Antisemitism:
I'll make it clear quickly. I'm not saying you have to agree with all of what Israel does, or any of it for that matter because let's be honest BiBi is an idiot and needs to go: but to deny the right of Israel's existance is to deny the legitimacy of a Jewish state. I've never seen this argument come up with Islamic states, nor have I seen this with Christian countries like the one I live in. The only arguments I seem to come across is secularisation theory which states all religions will be forgotten once we adopt science. Without getting into that can of worms it should be said that Israel's right to exist, as every named state within the rules of international law is final, and a states dissolution can only happen through complete conquest or self destruction.
Israeli identity has always been strong, I mean look at festivals like Hannukah and Passover within the Jewish faith and you'll see that Judaism and Israel are two sides of the same coin as the religion operates within the gift of a nomadic society of former slaves, the Hebrews, being given the gift of a homeland. To deny the right of Israel's existance is therefore to deny the existance of Judaism, which subsequently denies the existance of all Jews. I'm right here, right now, typing this up. I am a jew. I'm a proud Jew and I exist. Jews exist. Israel and Jerusalem exist. It has long before I was born, and it will exist long after I'm dead. I'm tired of having to hide my identity as a Jew both online and in person. The reason I've had to hide it was because people on the whole just hate Jews. I understand it you disagree with actions taken by the Jewish state but to deny the right for Israel to exist is to deny my right to exist.
It would be identical to telling a Christian that the Vatican city must cease to exist due to the crusades killing millions, or telling a Muslim to give up Mecca due to the first and second caliphate taking the region by the sword in the name of islam and Mohammed. All religions, and all states have done things that they're not proud of. Take the Germans for example, who quite literally had Hitler and the Nazis. Did I like what Hitler did? Not really he killed half of my family. But does that make me hate Germans? No. It never has and it never will. Germans have a right to exist. Germany has a right to exist. It always has, and it always will; just like Israel or any other nation state.
This may lead you to say: well what about Palestine?
The two kinds of Palestinian:
Palestine, or more specifically the group of people calling themselves Palestinians are yet to declare themselves a state for two reasons. The first is that there are Egyptian and Jordanian Palestinians, and they do not get on. To call each other one and the same would be an insult to themselves because of Egypt and Jordan's history with one another. As I'm writing this, I can link this to quote a few jokes about the Ashkenaz and Sephardis. They just write themselves. Anyways, back to the problem with most people's understanding of the history of the conception of Palestinians and why making one collective people can't really happen. The second part of why Palestinians can't be one collective plays off of the first. Jordanian and Egyptian sub-sects cause uprisings in the '70s after the six day war as the two groups that end up both calling themselves Palestinians think that Jordan and Egypt respectively should carry on attacking Israel until they have victory or death. Read about the last line of defence at Golan and decide for yourself which is more likely if you're really willing to look into how successful this mindset would have been. This is the reason we have both black and red keffiyehs, as both colours come from two different countries. The red is Jordanian from what I know if you were curious. Anyways both communities carry on this victim mentality of victory or death and see themselves as a sort of Martyr nation through their own political beliefs and developments over time, and so when they see eachother playing the same beat they get really pissed off with each other. Think of little Britain and the 'i am the only gay in the village' skit. It's almost exactly like that unfortunately.
This leads to my conclusion on the second part of this. I just want the west bank Palestinians and Gazan Palestinians to consolidate a solid sense of identity outside of hating my race and leave the past and their version of evens behind. What happened happened. In war no one really wins you just have survivors with more land because the people that were there beforehand are either dead or left. Both Jews and Arabs have experienced that. Frequently. Both communities are so damn similar in our sense of humour, history, food and fashion sense 🤣.
The superpower:
All jokes aside we're so much more similar than we think so whats the point of hating each other? Yes, I'm a jew. I understand that a lot of people hate me. But I think that if we just sit and talk about our cultural experiences Jews and Arabs are going to realise how much we have in common and there's just no point fighting because it's essentially killing the closest thing to you. In most languages the people closest to you are called family. Let's stop killing our own family and realise two things: one, Jews and Arabs are almost identical in how we perceive identity and culture and two, the middle east if it united itself would have enough cultural history through islam and Judaism, it's subsequent mathematical, scientific and economic wisdoms and resources to be the largest superpower the world has ever seen in recorded history. So whilst I'd like to address the anti-Semitism in this sub in the immediate I'm genuinely serious about staring a Judeo-Christo-Islamic empire but that's probably because I'm 5 coffees deep into a long work night at god knows how late.
TL;DR: Jews exist and so does Israel. Doesn't mean Israel's always right but don't deny it should exist. See Germany, the Vatican city/Italy and Greece and apply the same logic. It doesn't make sense. It's just masked antisemitism. Palestine isn't a state yet. It should be. West bank and Gazan Palestinians need to consolidate and get on with each other. Palestinians, Israelis and all Jews/Arabs are really similar so the conflict is nonsensical. (Almost feels like we were made to fight a proxy war because the USA and Russia realised the middle east once united would be the biggest superpower of all time and due to the rich cultural and racial ties wouldn't slow down in thousands of years, it would just keep getting stronger.) Let's stop fighting each other and talk about what we should be doing as Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Israelis or just human beings so that both sides can learn to love each other like the family it is.
PS: I hope we all have a little think about the Israeli- Arab conflict in light of this: "Almost feels like we were made to fight a proxy war because the USA and Russia realised the middle east once united would be the biggest superpower of all time and due to the rich cultural and racial ties, as well as the wealth of resources and the fantastic scientific , mathematical and philosophical minds these two races have created (Einstein, Rumi, Abu Shuja, Oppenheimer ect) wouldn't slow down in thousands of years, it would just keep getting stronger. "

Intro

It’s not much of a stretch to say that violence is the primary form of interaction in video games. With a handful of exceptions, most video games involve guys whacking other guys, with varying degrees of brutality. Even chill games fall into this - Stardew Valley has sections with combat in them! Considering the pervasiveness of violence in video games, there has been a ton of amateur and academic commentary on the topic. However, while this is a well-established school of thought, I haven’t seen people try to apply this to Fire Emblem specifically.
So, let’s do that now! In this post, I’ll be exploring how violence in Fire Emblem is implemented - what limitations are placed on violence, how it warps wider game and narrative design, and what it implicitly says and does not say. I hope this post doesn’t come off as too early-2010s “makes you think”-y, but I do think there are multiple interesting things worth talking about here!
Despite the length of this post, "a brief discussion" is an appropriate title, as we won't be able to go into depth on everything. After all, video games are holistic works, so the attitude towards violence is relevant to every aspect of their design. However, I have managed to wrangle some of these threads into the following structure: first a discussion on the fundamental mode of interaction in Fire Emblem, then how stories are constructed with regards to violence, and ending with the aesthetics of violence and how they relate to characters. Also, as FE is a huge series, be aware that I am gonna be making some broad statements which may not apply to each individual plot point of every game. I actually planned to write 3 case studies around Thracia 776, Fates, and Three Houses (which have the most interesting attitudes to violence in the series IMO) which point out these deviations, but this post is way too long and full of tangents already. If people are interested, I’ll make a followup to this post which goes into them in more detail. Also also, because of the nature of this post, I’ll actually give a useful TL;DR for once:
TL;DR: Nintendo games must be fun mechanically, and they can’t be too uncomfortable narratively. If you try to provide a counterpoint by saying “oh this Kirby final boss is super dark it eats 100 morbillion galaxies”, you do not deserve rights. IntSys has to keep to this as a 2nd party publisher, but they also have to deal with the fact that their games are at least nominally about ‘war’ (or at least they put their toes into that particular thematic pool). This conflict between making a fun video game for children/teens and the wider framing of the narrative leads to interesting narrative and aesthetic tensions. also fun is cringe, misery is based

“Do you like hurting other people?” (or The Fundamental Mode of Interaction)

OK LISTEN I KNOW I LITERALLY JUST SAID THAT I DIDN’T WANT TO COME ACROSS AS A EARLY 2010s “VIOLENCE IN VIDYA BAD :O????” PERSON BUT I SWEAR I’M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS
The best place to start when talking about violence in video games is to think about the primary form of interaction in said game. In the case of Fire Emblem, this is in the in-chapter gameplay. Sure, in objective terms the player moves arbitrary objects across a 2D grid which perform subtraction on arbitrary objects controlled by the computer, but this is always framed as controlling a squad of soldiers to engage in (typically lethal) combat with enemies (who are normally also soldiers). When you’re not doing this in-chapter gameplay, you are preparing for the next chapter of combat. This involves surveying the area of combat, preparing weapon loadouts, etc, however more recent entries also include light life-sim-esque elements. To summarize, Fire Emblem’s interactivity involves ordering violence as well as the preparations to order said violence.
For players, this strategic thinking is extremely fun and is the primary draw of the series! You have all these tier lists of who’s better at killing, discussion of the maps where you do the killing, complaints about the length of gameplay sections where you don’t do killing, etc. This is by design, as while I don’t know the core brand tenets of Nintendo, I imagine the Reggie quote “If it isn’t fun, why bother?” is carved into a solid gold statue of Mario in the office lobby. This then is enforced on all associated studios, including IntSys and so Fire Emblem. While I would disagree with that Reggie quote (especially the bit where he says “If it’s not a battle, where’s the fun?” which is a wild statement to make about an entire medium), this approach to making games is ultimately fine, and so IntSys tailored the strategic gameplay to be satisfying to your dopamine receptors. You could analyse what the normalisation of violence even in ‘just for fun’ games says about wider gaming culture, but I won’t get into that here. In any case, let’s dig into a few specifics of FE’s interactivity.
One thing that’s interesting with regard to strategy games is the detached perspective of the player. You order units and observe the resulting violence, but it’s not tactile, you don’t directly swing the sword or shoot the bow or cast the spell like with action games. This adds a layer of separation between the player and what fundamentally happens, at least within the framing that the game provides. It’s not like Call of Duty, where your relationship to the violence is very visceral, where you view everything down the barrel of a gun. OK, I probably shouldn’t use a series that I have very little personal experience with (I only listen to the supplementary lore material, so let’s talk about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. While you’re not directly in the driver’s seat, John Sekiro reacts to your every input with extreme responsiveness, so overcoming the game’s challenges i.e. stabbing people is incredibly visceral and satisfying. While this violence is fantastical in nature, there is sufficient blood and explicit sword-action to clearly say “oh yeah you are violently killing all of those bozos with a katana”. Coming back to FE, not only are you far more detached from the violence, it is presented in an extremely cartoony manner… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, we’ll get to the aesthetics later. Point is, Fire Emblem gives the viewpoint of a stoic commander, who Does What Needs To Be Done™, and not the viewpoint of an actual soldier who has to do the actual killing.
Now let’s view the player’s perspective on violence from a different angle. Fire Emblem intends for its combat to be relatively relaxed on the player side of things - the turn-based nature allows the player to calmly think through all of their moves, and you typically have perfect information on the enemies. The only exceptions to this are Fog of WaSame Turn Reinforcements, which are rare and typically unpopular amongst the fanbase. This leans into ‘combat as sport’, where (going back to the Reggie quote) you have a fun time picking apart a puzzle with the tools you have, and we all collectively enjoy this! This is a valid way of designing strategy games, and I like what IntSys has done. However, it’s not the only way of making these games - for example, in Total War you have to juggle all your battalions in real time whilst the enemy is bearing down on you, and the XCOM games always have Fog of War and limited information on the enemies, with you never knowing what kind of awful new monster is going to suddenly charge at you. Don’t get me wrong, neither of these follow ‘combat as war’, the principle that violence should properly mimic the stress, tension and unfairness of actual conflict. Hell, neither of them are particularly mature either - Total War is the strategy game equivalent of smashing action figures together, and XCOM emulates a pulp sci-fi alien invasion story. However, the additional pressures these games have make them hew slightly closer to actual conflict, putting you more in that mindset in a way that the clean fun Fire Emblem doesn’t really do. Again, I want to say FE’s approach to violence in in-map gameplay is fine, but when all three of these franchises have an explicit narrative framing of ‘warfare’, it does make Fire Emblem’s narrative a little more… stretched.
Finally, I want to briefly mention the maps. To steal from a brilliant Jacob Geller video, these are Worlds Designed For Violence. At least outside of the Kaga games, the maps you fight on are primarily designed around how the player interacts with them, i.e. fights on them. While I imagine the narrative designers and artists at IntSys are involved throughout the map design process, the gameplay flow probably takes precedence most of the time. Maps are not designed to resemble realistic places that you have to fight through, they are instead designed primarily to provide fun gameplay experiences before being dressed up by the artists to look realistic/fit the specific story beat. This is a more consistently entertaining approach to map design - heaven knows we have a lot of Kaga castle assault maps which are as fun as actually assaulting an entrenched position IRL - but this lack of friction could potentially take the bite out of the intended vibe, neuter any commentary on violence throughout the story.
You may have noticed that we’ve only talked about the “in-map” gameplay for now, when there’s an entire second half of these games, i.e. all the gameplay between the maps. Don’t worry, we’ll get to all of that, but this may fit better in:

Something something “ludonarrative” something something (or Narrative Implications)

(To clarify, here I’m going to talk about the wider plots and narrative structure as opposed to characterisation, as that fits more into the aesthetics of the series)
It’s not bold to say that the narratives of games have to warp around the core gameplay structure. Especially in AAA video game production, the narrative designers usually have to take a back seat to the systems and level designers, at least outside of the initial rough outline they provide in the original game pitch. In this case, the job of the writer is to form vaguely coherent connective tissue between individual levels, setpieces and expensive pre-rendered cutscenes. This must be a very difficult job, and is probably the reason why most video game stories are the way they are. I am not privy to IntSys internal meetings, but I imagine they abide by this paradigm, trying to give a reason for why you fight 20 battles which roughly align with plot beats that were decided years ago.
Put another way, the writers of Fire Emblem must contrive a reason why the characters fight a vast number of violent battles in a strategic manner. This has a pretty easy solution - war! We have found something it’s good for, as whenever the gameplay designers decide that an extra map is required, the writers can just insert “oh no there’s a blockade of enemy soldiers in the way, guess you gotta kill them all”. This is the case for almost all the games and is a fair enough narrative choice, as it’s frankly one of the few scenarios where you could reasonably contrive so many battles, but it’s worth examining this in a bit more detail.
Even in the framing of warfare, there are still a lot of skirmishes, which sometimes the narrative or tone fails to support - or at least, their presence means that violence isn’t taken that seriously. Let’s take an example from early in Awakening: Emmeryn sends the Shepherds to negotiate an alliance with Regna Ferox. On the way, they are ambushed by Risen on the Northroad (1), have to fight the border guards who think Chrom is a bandit I think??? (2), and then after arriving they need to take part in Regna Ferox’s ritual combat to secure their alliance (3). These beats aren’t necessarily bad, and I actually think Awakening uses these opportunities quite well: the Risen are established as a constant threat to the world (except not really in the main story but that’s a whole other thing), “Marth'' gets more development, we set up Regna Ferox as fighty people who like to fight, and while the middle encounter is very tenuous it does set up a funny joke in Cynthia’s paralogue. However, I want to communicate that if the map/encounter designers need X maps between plot points A and B - in this case, needing low-stakes trials in the tutorial period - then there’s gonna be a fair bit of narrative filler. That is to say, there must be multiple combat encounters that kinda just happen, which makes violence a lot more casual in the narrative. See also the myriad examples of “oh shit random bandits attack!”, used to have a lower stakes map, with bandits appearing and vanishing as needed. This works fine enough in the context of ‘combat as sport’, allowing your favourite scrunglo to build up a triple-digit body count, but this casual attitude circumvents potentially interesting ideas with regards violence. Taking the example further, banditry and its causes are never seriously explored, as bandits are just treated as a filler enemy (except in Based As Hell Thracia 776).
Another narrative consequence of needing so many fights is that… you need to fight. That is to say, any anti-war sentiment or appeal to diplomacy in the series is fundamentally undercut by a) strategic combat being a core appeal of the series and b) narrative beats needing to be structured around fighting enemies. It’s a struggle to have moments of diplomacy and reconciliation when you had a fight within 3 minutes of said moment, lest some people start screaming that things are getting boring. This also makes any appeals to pacifism kinda moot. Xander’s quote about “war bad” in Conquest is utter bullshit, as a huge part of the marketing around that route focuses on the coolness of the tactical combat and its challenge. Eirika and Ephraim can never be equal, because Ephraim’s “fighting is fucken awesome” is encouraged by the gameplay, and Eirika can NEVER save 11037 because we need a final boss and no-one else fits the bill.
Speaking of, in video games it’s best practice to have a big bad guy you fight at the end of the story, the toughest mechanical challenge coinciding with the narrative climax. In Fire Emblem, you have one grand final battle which decides the fate of the war and/or world, before cutting to a brief wrap-up and then credits. This is an attempt to make these games satisfying, which is fine, but this is at odds with an anti-war message (which FE often gestures towards) - that is, actual wars tend to be deeply unsatisfying in a narrative sense! Oftentimes, after a decisive battle, things just kinda keep going for a little while afterwards with casualties continuing to pile up until peace terms are agreed. In the few cases where there is a final battle, it’s more of a formality as the decisive moment occurred months ago. See World War 1 and… World War 2 for examples of each, not to mention a whole host of war-related books and films. The problem with doing this in a video game is that it would require having multiple one-sided fights past the most climatic fight, which would be unfun, and we return to that fucking Reggie quote again. While video games can effectively explore this anti-war narrative space - This War of Mine is a fantastic example - it just doesn’t gel with the fun games that IntSys wants to make. I bring this up in the context of FE because Fire Emblem has such an aesthetic focus on warfare compared to other video games, so it sticks out even further. Even in FE6/FE9 where the war is effectively over in the final few maps, the enemies still remain extremely challenging, because if they didn’t things would be boring.
A few minor things that didn’t fit in above before we wrap up this section. First of all, in making an action packed story, Fire Emblem neglects an important aspect of army life in warfare - the “hurrying up and waiting”. In the majority of cases, the breaks between fights is under 10 minutes, it’s just glossed over. Fire Emblem Three Houses is the exception to this, but there it’s more framed as school life. Some people may say “what’s the point in having large amounts of timewasting where nothing happens in my game about war” and to that I would say fuck you, I want to play Jarhead Emblem. Next, Fire Emblem involves fighting people AND monsters, but these targets are typically given equal narrative weight, outside of maybe a funny line of dialogue about someone being afraid of monsters. In 99% of cases, enemy soldiers you fight have no more humanity than literal monsters. The death of any of your beloved soldiers is a tragedy with big sad death quotes, the death of those poor fuckers is quite literally a statistic which is proudly used to rank how well your guys have done at the end of the game. Finally, the limited scope of the violence the series can show limits the potential impact of scenes. In some cases, this is good as the implication is enough, e.g. the ‘Monica’ scene in Sacred Stones is wonderfully grim and would be weakened by anything explicit. However, a number of other scenes are neutered by the limitations on violence. This fundamentally relates to the aesthetics of the series:

insert prozd tweet/skit here (or Aesthetics, Tone, and Characters)

I’ve been talking a lot about ‘the violence committed’, and this might have seemed a bit weird to you. It’s a true statement, but because the violence is mostly cartoony and abstracted - bad guys disappear into nothingness, there’s no blood, etc - it’s hard to think of it in that way. It’s basically impossible to place Fire Emblem in the same artistic sphere as, say, All Quiet on the Western Front. This aesthetic sense was partially tech-limited in the early NES and SNES games, which was grandfathered into the more graphically complex titles, but it’s also related to how the aesthetics unavoidably warp the tone of the work. IntSys needs their games to be relatively lighthearted and unconcerned with the consequences of its violence, as one of the core appeals of these games is the charming cast of characters. As you would expect, it would be a lot harder to appreciate your goofy blorbos and their lighthearted chats about nothing if you could see the brutal consequences of their triple digit body counts. If violence was more realistic, there would be a lot less “ooh I like training and/or this one hyperspecific food” or “I like peace, but I guess violence may be possibly needed sometimes” and there would have to be a lot more trauma and dourness. There are also age rating concerns, as you can’t exactly sell Come And See Emblem to pre-teens. And once more, to clarify: Fire Emblem as it exists now is fine! I like the lighthearted tone of this series, and I like the characters that reside within it. However, a few problems do arise from IntSys’s approach to violence, as occasionally they brush up against darker ideas but (due to similar reasons to the above) they can never commit to them, which neuters their potential impact. This is especially troublesome with regards to characterisation, as the little dudes are a core appeal, so if something is off that could cause problems. In a sense, at points we have severe aesthetic tension.
A fairly useful case study to see how this affects characterisation is with Mozu in Fire Emblem Fates. Mozu is a charming character, a genial country bumpkin with a bit of an edge at times, who has fond memories of her hometown. This lines up with the lighthearted tone of her recruitment paralogue, where (checks notes) her entire village gets massacred by inhuman monsters, with her mother literally being murdered right in front of her, and she joins up with Corrin’s party because there is literally nothing left of her old life. I understand that people who experience extreme trauma do still manage to live meaningful lives, and that IntSys wouldn’t want to have a character who is a barely functional traumatised mess for 90% of the campaign. However, this doesn’t explain the sheer dissonance between the relatively normal and well-adjusted Mozu who quietly remembers her lost loved ones, and the fact that her village got My Lai’d a handful of weeks ago in the game’s timeline. IMO this would work a lot better if there were a few survivors (instead of literally everyone else dying), with Mozu actively choosing to leave her old life to help others instead of being forced to leave by circumstance. This reduction in scope would mitigate the dissonance between the character and what actually happens to her. This is by far the most extreme example in the series, however I’m sure you can think of others. My issue here is not with having ‘normal’ characters, or with them suffering tragedies, my issue is the dissonance between the two when viewing the scope of said tragedies. This is just one way the series wants to get into darker territory, then swiftly backing off instead of delving into the consequences.
This aesthetic restriction also affects the potential impact of dramatic scenes in the main story, limiting what the focus of these scenes can actually be. This little bit will involve heavy spoilers for Genealogy of the Holy War and Spec Ops: The Line (I KNOW THESE GAMES ARE VERY DIFFERENT WITH VERY DIFFERENT INTENDED DEMOGRAPHICS IN VERY DIFFERENT CULTURAL CONTEXTS, SHUT UP). Both have a very important narrative moment around their midpoints, involving fire magic/white phosphorus respectively. In each game, the deaths that occur are utterly horrific when you think about them. In FE4 the focus is on the drama of the plot twist and effects on the characters, with the actual effects of the violence being left to implication. We don’t know if this was the original intent of Kaga and the team, or if this was enforced by various tech- and publisher-related restrictions, but in either case we do not see anything explicit. In any case, in Spec Ops: The Line, the horror and graphic nature of the violence is completely inescapable, and therefore forms the core of the turning point of the story. The specifics of the violence itself are crucial - the game does not work if you don’t see the consequences of the white phosphorus - and it leads beautifully to the complete descent of its endgame. You may be saying “of course you couldn’t show that violence in FE, it’s a kids game” which is true, and in any case the scene in Genealogy is very good, even without showing the violence. I imagine if we get a remake in the year 202X we wouldn’t see anything explicit anyway, partially due to the publisher but also because the scene doesn’t necessarily need it. The point I am trying to make is that the aesthetics form a limitation on what Fire Emblem can explore, narrative space that the series fundamentally cannot reach.
One more thing, and this isn’t really about the games themselves but the impressions leading into them, and how the aesthetics can affect that. Do you guys remember when the intro cutscene of Three Houses was released a few weeks before release? I do, and I also remember the collective shock of the community when seeing the early previews. It was so drastically different to everything that had come before, and consequently was really intriguing - you can see a lot of speculation in the above comments. To clarify, I don’t want to pretend that 3H is some kind of super mature ultra gritty war story, or that blood = good game, but that beginning cutscene gave one hell of a first impression. Even though the game isn’t that much darker than any other FE game, the sheer unexpectedness put people off-kilter in a kinda awesome way. Does the game actually deliver? YMMV, but I think this (and some of the later cutscenes, such as the mid-game Dimitri one) work quite well. Sometimes, a little injection of harsher violence can go a long way.

Conclusion

Frankly I don’t really have a conclusion, sorry. As you can see, there are so many disparate strands, I can’t possibly make one grand thesis statement. Maybe the inherent contradictions of having warfare in a family friendly video game weakens the potential end result? I guess, but I don’t want to imply that what we have now is bad, as it is pretty good tbh. So, uhh…
…
OK, if I had to say something, it’s more about the process of making this. Having to try and think about how violence intersects with a video game you like takes you in a number of different directions. Ultimately, this process was really fulfilling for me, and I would recommend that you do the same (for FE or anything else)! Trying to analyse something you enjoy from a perspective not usually applied is pretty neat. If you guys have any thoughts (on the points above or your own), I’d be very interested to hear them!
Also, if people are interested, I’ll try to make a few case studies. I would focus on Thracia 776, Fates, and Three Houses, as (when thinking on this topic) I found that these games were consistently the most intriguing, with the most interesting relationships to violence. This would probably take a while though, as I am gonna be very busy in June, and I probably won’t have time this month either.

It’s dads birthday today so I said happy birthday and things. I really ought to paint the little clay thing I made him. I made him that, I also need to make a card which I have a vision for, and then I got him some super nice warm fluffy socks as ever since his heart thing he gets cold very easily. It’s a very lacklustre present but I know he doesn’t care anyway and I just haven’t had it in me to put my usual thought and effort in. Same with Andy’s, I’ve put more planning into his thought, but it doesn’t feel right. But I think I’m just extra nervous after the Valentine’s Day box failure. And I was excited about that one and put a lot of time and work into it, I mean it was more hand made stuff than bought stuff obviously, so I’m wondering if he doesn’t like the handmade stuff so much. I guess he doesn’t? So I’m holding back on that this time. Well no, I made him little clay bowls but idk if I’ll send any because I don’t think I have the ability to not be upset if he ignores it. So maybe I won’t. Anyway I’m just feeling really nervous this time. Anyway.
I’m cold and tired this morning. I feel okay though which is good.
I felt embarrassed last night. He called me later on afterwards and explained how he had to abruptly end the call as he felt unwell, and my baby sounded SO unwell, like on the bathroom floor and all. My honey :( So I feel okay now, or I felt okay after he explained that. I felt bad for feeling embarrassed too. But I still feel kind of embarrassed so I may as well vent about it here so I can let it go. So we were talking about his friend and the idea of me with him and I don’t often say much when we talk about whatever hot stuff we’re into, I tend to just follow his lead which tbh is entirely what I’m like when it comes to sex and stuff, I feel like I tend to be the epitome of submissive. Except for sometimes, sometimes I like to sort of take control like if I’m on top or giving a bj or whatever, like the idea of initiating it and climbing on top of him. I often daydream about him being awake at the opposite time to me, and me finding him at his computer working away at 2am or something and straddling him either in his chair or wherever else and things… escalating. That to me is me taking control, idk if it actually is or not. Let’s pretend it is. ANYWAY. So last night I was detailing my thoughts and what I thought about and what I wanted and… it fell flat. Which I realise now is him feeling sick, but I didn’t know that at the time and he didn’t say anything. He was asking questions and telling me to be more detailed, so I did, and it resulted in him saying okay well I’m sleepy so I should go. And I mean if he’s tired or not into it that’s fine, it’s not an issue, but I still felt embarrassed. I still find this sort of thing kind of daunting and I know I’m not any good at it, I know I’m not creative nor do I ever add anything much to our conversations, I tend to feel like the oral equivalent to a starfish which I do NOT like to be physically speaking, and it worries me he thinks I’m going to be like that. Like from memory the only times I’ve been starfishy have been with R when I didn’t want it and said so but he fucked me anyway. I don’t think I was much of a willing participant those times. But so idk, I guess I felt like I put myself out there a bit last night and it felt like I messed it up because he clearly didn’t want a bar of it - at least that’s what I felt like as I didn’t know he wasn’t feeling well. It just felt embarrassing and I felt like such a prudish failure, like I can’t even get him interested in anything? I actively put him off? I feel like it’s kind of my job to be able to make him feel a certain way and to fail at that makes me embarrassed, uneasy and nervous. Anyway I fell asleep feeling not so good about it all, but then he called an hour or two later and told me how he’d been really sick and then I just felt immense guilt for being so self absorbed and focused on how I feel and not him. So I’m not upset or anything of the sort, but I still feel embarrassed. Oh well. I’ll not dwell. I feel MUCH more concerned about how he’s feeling or felt than how I feel anyway. My poor baby.
I keep wanting to call him pet names but I know we aren’t doing that yet. Well no, I call him honeybunny but I do that slightly to tease him even though I mean it with my whole heart. But it’s sort of a not proper one, whereas if I said babe or baby or whatever that’s different. And we aren’t doing that. I don’t even want to tbh, it’s the same as trying to not tell him I love him - I want to save these things. I want there to be a line between now and when we’re properly together, and things like pet names and saying I love you go with the latter. I obviously fail with the ily things like when I write him cards but I tend to blur the line a little then. Anyway. He’ll be my baby babe soon enough! Well baby when it’s just us, babe anywhere else. I’m not calling him baby in front of anyone, I don’t really want to be that person. Same way he’ll never be honeybunny in front of anyone. They’re lil names for just us. Also I don’t think he’d appreciate me saying “honeybun could you please pass me that” or whatever in front of his friends… which kind of makes me want to say it but I won’t. I’m clearly rambling to avoid work so I’ll shush now.
He also mentioned the idea of showing his friend a picture of me and he was like “yeah and he might say she’s hot” or whatever but I don’t think he would, I think he would say “whatever makes you happy man” or something to that effect and that will proceed to set off alarm bells for Andy and he’s going to potentially realise he’s been as blind as a bat to me and my ugliness. It’s like that thing he told me about the other day, it’s some kind of comedian or something on ig and he does lil skits imitating his wife, they sounded super funny and based on the comments he read like they’re unnervingly familiar in every relationship, but anyway the one he told me about was the guy looking at his wife and her being like what are you looking at and him saying you and her replying well don’t. And then he said a comment was women are afraid if you look at us you’ll finally realise how ugly we are - anyway I feel that to my CORE and the idea of his friend judging me made me think of it. Because whatever his friend says is going to make Andy rethink things, like it sounds as though his friend dates super pretty girls, well presumably, I always kind of associate strippers as being hot but in a kind of rough way - yes I’m the rudest and meanest girl alive I know - but anyway, I presume ones in Sydney are hotter than most given it’s such a big city and so many stupidly stunning women live there. So ANYWAY my point is I don’t look like that, I’m not pretty or anything of the sort so I know for a fact his friend will say “I’m glad she makes you happy mate” and then BAM - Andy’s questioning everything. Finally coming to the realisation I’m not worth a minute of his time. I realise he isn’t as shallow as that, but let’s be real everyone’s a bit shallow. I really hope he doesn’t do it. I don’t want ti embarrass or let Andy down either :(
It’s almost 3pm and I’ve not yet eaten anything today, I just didn’t feel like it earlier but now I feel kind of sick but I don’t really have anything to eat that doesn’t require cooking and I don’t want to cook/I feel too sick to. Such a dilemma. I wonder if anyone has ever called a baby dilemma, I bet they have.
I have a persistent image of him with his arm around me while he’s chatting away to a friend or whatever idk, like standing in front of him a little and leaning back into him with this arm around my waist holding me tight against him almost subconsciously and the feeling of how warm he will be and how delicious I know he smells and just feeling completely and utterly his and everyone seeing that I’m his. I know it’s pathetic and whatever else to think about this sort of thing but whatever, no one needs to know and I shan’t share this thought. It’s sick and twisted how badddddd I love this man. Sick and twisted in the sense this is entirely not something I’ve felt before and am therefore suss. And it’s scary. He could break my heart into teeny tiny little pieces at any point. And let’s be honest here, I’ve never put myself in this situation before, I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. Hm. It still baffles me that he thinks I could be seeing someone else sometimes, like no I’m sorry sir but you’re it and my sad little heart has been entirely put into your custody for the rest of time. I think I forget that he can’t read my mind, I mean obviously he can’t but he just cuts through all my BS so easily and so sometimes I feel like because of that he can see how I’m thinking and feeling. Does that make sense? Likely not, as per. I just want to shake him sometimes and say I’M ALL YOURE AND NOONE ELSES AND I AM NOT GOING TO CHANGE THAT. But that’s a bit agro so I won’t.
Whenever I have no earrings in for like more than two days they start to close up again. Even one day sometimes?! I wore hoops last week for the ballet, and then I took them out that night and never put my lil diamond studs back in which are currently my every day ones I never take out. But so this morning I had to basically repierce it, I mean there was clearly still a lil hole as there was no blood but it hurt and I was scared to do it. I need to remember to always have something in there. I always heal quickly though, like if I hurt myself my skin heals super quick. I wonder if it’s linked to how I don’t really get sick? Like I do get sick, case in point the other night, but I mean cold/flu sick. Is it a good thing? I’m not sure. I assume it is but then I’ve learned I tend to assume the wrong thing so I don’t know. I’ll just google it.
I really don’t want to go to this family lunch on Saturday and I feel awful about that. I just always feel like such an outsider at family things that are more than just me, mum and dad. Even though it’s just my brother and his family, I still feel like an outsider. He said my niece has been asking to see me though so that makes me feel warm & fuzzy inside. This sounds weird to say, and I know rationally speaking this sort of feeling isn’t a thing, but I cannot shake the firm belief I’m too much of a bland loser no-life failure for this family and that every chance available they look at me and think that. And the older my niece and nephew get the more I feel like they think that. I just don’t feel like I’m good enough to be a part of this family and it’s perhaps the biggest reason I hate extended family occasions.
I ended up working til late…ish. Not that bad, just til 7. That is an additional two hours but I used to work much later so it’s hard to say what’s late. I had quite a productive work day all in all, so that feels nice.
I made tofu veggie noodles for dinner and it was quite nice, I went a little OTT with the chilli oil though and I feel a little sick.
Welllllll it’s 8pm so I guess I’ll just post whatever utter drivel this journal is. Night night

The first ten qualifiers have been decided. Today, the media, accredited fan press and later this evening the first live audience get to watch the second semi-final in full. Our team also has accreditation and will be covering both dress rehearsals today for you to enjoy!

How will this coverage work?

The format will stay the same as on Monday. In this afternoon's thread, we will be trialling running our commentary a new way. I will be updating this thread after each performance with my rough thoughts on each rehearsal, with some additional thoughts and comments from some of the other mods too. Please keep refreshing this thread - new updates will be added to the bottom of the OP roughly every four minutes!
For this evening's jury show/dress rehearsal 2/evening preview, we will be covering the rehearsal via Reddit Live like we did last year. This will allow you to read a variety of voices and thoughts on the performances.
___
15:47CEST: The stream is now live! The show will begin with a recap of the first semi which is yet to be edited.
15:49CEST: After a short intro where Malin and Petra parody Tattoo and its staging from inside tanning cubicles, our hosts open up the show, a lot faster than for the first semi! We missed a skit in the first bit due to stream lag, but seems there's a joke about France/Italy/Spain all performing in the semi. Malin is in a yellow-pink short dress and Petra in a regal red gown. The press in attendance give a warm round of applause and the show begins!
Song 1: Malta
Postcard: The songs of choice are 1998 and 2021. Sarah is enjoying the outdoors in Malta, including a moment with a cockatoo!
Performance: Sarah is a little weak vocally but it sounds to me like she's saving her vocals, apart from the massive note at the end which she nails! Stream lagged for the second verse sadly so we missed it - before that there's a lot of green graphics which I'm not sure have been seen much in the galleries. Sarah is clearly enjoying herself and hitting the cameras well. Some of the camerawork is clever, but there's still a lot of wide and panning shots. A decent opening all things considered.
Song 2: Albania
Postcard: Afraid my internet is really not having a fun time, so we missed the first song in the postcard, but of course 2012 is the other one.
Performance: Besa has another new costume! A kind of aquamarine blue-green dress with a hood - it's better than the weird astronaut costume she first chose but I think I prefer the second rehearsal one. The stage feels so big and empty in this one and it's hard to put into words given there is a lot going on, from dancers who are stood in front of Besa, to hands and other dancers on the backdrop and stage floor. She encourages the audience to sing along in the first chorus. Vocally she's fine apart from a couple of duff vocal acrobatics at the end, but I think what's going on is distracting more than helping to amplify the song. She looks pleased with herself as she leaves the stage.
Song 3: Greece
Postcard: 1974 and 2005 are the songs of choice! Marina is enjoying the city, with images of classical Greek statues of course.
Performance: The performance starts of in a trimmed aspect radio like it's an instagram or tiktok video with heart emojis rising on screen. The main kicker here is whether the single camerashot works. It's working for fellow mod CaptainAnaAmari, but I'm a lot less convinced - it doesn't match the energy of the choreography for me. She's also pretty weak vocally, ever so slightly flat throughout. We finally get a different camerashot in the last minute with a really cool ceiling shot which goes inside one of the cubes, and then we get more conventional camerawork, with lots of wide shots and and panning shots. The stage is really pretty and colourful on the whole.
Technical Issues: Unfortunately, we've lost access to the livestream due to refreshing the stream too many times to combat stream freezing. We're trying to regain access at the moment by contacting the help desk but I'm afraid we're going to miss quite a few songs. We caught a very small bit of Switzerland, which confirms Nemo does indeed have a slightly different costume - it's still pink and furry, but with more of a collar if that makes sense? They were singing brilliantly as ever but afraid we saw too little to make much more comment.
We are now waiting for a response from the help desk (we know other people have also had this issue). Sorry for the lack of commentary in the mean time!
We're back! No response from the helpdesk but as many others were having the same issue (i.e. Discord, ESCUnited) it seems like they've stopped that restriction. No more stream refreshing I guess! We caught the end of Latvia, which is basically what was on the clip. Sadly that means no Switzerland, Czechia, France, Armenia, Austria, Denmark, Armenia and Latvia in this coverage, but we'll cover them tonight. We go straight from Latvia to...
Finalist B: Spain
Postcard: I missed the oldschool song due to the excitement of reviving the stream, but of course 2022 is the more recent one. A brief technical delay after the postcard and then we're in...
Performance: Mery and her dancers start off inside the cube. The press in the arena love it and are singing along, of course. One of the dancers (not the ginger one!) had trouble with his costume change and they had to pause their choreography whilst he tried to get rid of the stray trouser leg. Mery is vocally how she always is - just about on tune but flanked by a lot of supporting prerecorded vocals. The camerawork feels quite messy to me, although there's a cool top-down shot near the end. The final chorus has some light pyro.
Song 10: San Marino
Postcard: No ad break or skit before or after Spain, interestingly. The featured songs are 2014 and 2019 - how dare they erase 2021 like this!
Performance: Sounds to me like Kenzy is saving vocally here, she's basically just talking the chorus. The staging is so colourful and fun, there's some really cool camera angles and use of the cartoonish visuals, and there's also a slight revamp to the instrumental break and final chorus, and loads of pyro at the end! San Marino aren't here to play - if you liked the snippet, you will love the full performance. A couple of untidy camera angles but nothing they can't tweak.
Song 11: Georgia
Postcard: 2015 and my favourite ESC song of all time 2007 are the featured songs! (CaptainAna is also very excited by these choices)
Performance: Starts off very atmospherically with the stage very red and Nutsa on her pedestal. If you have 'projections of artist on the backdrop' on your bingo card then this is the performance for you. It seems from the backdrop also that the fire Nutsa is attempting to put out is in fact the sun. Nutsa's perfect, powerful vocals rise above a layer of support prerecorded backing vocals. Really polished - if Georgia fail to qualify again this year, they certainly can't blame Nutsa and the staging.
Song 12: Belgium
Postcard: Belgium's winner, 1986, and 2015 are shown. As my flair indicates, this is one of my favourites this year so I am very nervous!
Performance: The performance starts out with intimate camerawork focussed on Mustii in the dark - he's then illuminated and steps forwards towards the halo of mics. A slight change of costume - his hands look a lot more gold to me than before, and the shirt is different too. The camerawork is working for me, although I still think they could have done more given how good the video is. The chorus has a very isolated bit of dry ice which seems to just be on his platform and kinda masks him. Vocally he's about the same as he has been so far in rehearsals, a bit pitchy generally sadly, especially in the falsetto of the chorus. He's more on tune in the 'before the party is over' to me, although the stream was deciding to lag for the first time since we got back online. I still think this song is strong enough to make it, but he's not done enough here to persuade his doubters yet.
Song 13: Estonia
Postcard: 2001 and 2009 are shown.
Performance: Afraid as much as I love this song I've not learned all the guys names, sorry! #shoddyjournalism. Anyway, it starts off with the first dude off stage making his way to the stage. He's shouting the vocals more than singing and is pretty out of tune, although the nature of the verse means it doesn't matter too much. These shouty vocals continue all out from most of the guys sadly. The lads are having fun, but I really think this feels both empty and messy, kinda like Albania earlier. The guys doing the veisson are projected onto the background at one point too, but I just want a stable camera angle to focus on the dance and its brilliance instead of darting around all over the place. We love this song, but will the casuals?
Qualifier C: Italy
Postcard: Again, straight into Italy without an ad break here. 2021 got featured, unfortunately I missed the first one due to typing up my thoughts on Estonia.
Performance: And the stream freezing is back in full force - maybe other press are all focussing in for one of the favourites! Angelina is back in the costume for the first rehearsals. Not convinced it works still as it blends her and her dancers into the already too dark stage. The stream was dead for the entire first half of the song, but we came back to Angelina owning the camera on her thrown flanked by her dancers. Angelina is brilliant as we all know but she could do with some better camera angles - she and her dancers get lost in the wide shots.
Song 14: Israel
Postcard: Still no ad break, are we having an ad-free show?? 1991 and 1998 are the songs of choice.
Performance: Eden starts off in her circle seemingly alone before the dry ice clears and her dancers appear on the edges. It looks like they've toned down some of the more aggressive 'dance moves', though their general movements feel way too much to me still - kinda like Georgia 2010 where the vocalist is impressive but the choreography is distracting more than complimenting. Eden is vocally flawless including the scream notes. The song ends with an orange light on the back fading. An effective performance on the whole.
A brief break, finally! With Petra reminding us how to vote. But only for ten seconds or so, maybe they need extra time to remove the prop.
Song 15: Norway
Postcard: 1986 and 2009 are the songs of choice. The band are skiing and playing cards, not at the same time.
Performance: After a brief technical delay, we're off! The blue laser lights from the ceiling look really effective here and the stage floor graphics are very clever and atsmospheric. I can't help but feel like it's lost some of the edge and magic it had in MGP though where the pre-recorded film inserts really added. The camerawork, although again it could still be fixed, is still relying too much on wide shots and panning angles when I just want to be intimately in the moment with the band.
Song 16: Netherlands
Postcard: 1998 (robbed!) and 2019 are the choices.
Performance: Well, as you'd expect from Joost the stage visuals are a feast of gags, including a stretched version of Joost's face, the polygonal Joost running in the background, the 'this graphic is unfinished' and a couple of other gems. The bird is still there, the melodic 'Euro-pa-pa-pa-papa-pa-pa' bit is all prerecorded backings, and he's still allowed the subtitles for the final speech in the sad bit. No tears from Joost this time, but it's still an effective ending and the camera lingers on that poignant final note. It's good fun, but it is obviously nowhere near the ridiculously high level of heights his hype team built up and if you expect anything more than a fun, light-hearted performance you will be disappointed. For all the theories, there is no big surprise.
17:21CEST: Petra and Malin arrive and open the voting!
Recap 1: The snippets are all the same basically as what we've already seen, so unfortunately I can't glean much from the songs we didn't see. Kaleen freestyles a bit in addressing the audience but is vocally shaky. The sad outro is the Dutch choice of clips.
Interval: Sing Along. Malin and Petra introduce that Swedes love a good sing-along, and then try to get the audience singing along with the start of Greece 2005, which works about as predictably poorly as you'd expect with a largely empty auditorium. Then Helena Paparizou shows up to take over and is vocally immaculate - she's certainly not lost her talent with age! So good in fact that she made the stream die, hooray! Fortunately it's just come back and there's lots of images of fans singing along on the screen.
Then it's Charlotte Perrelli Nilsson's turn, another lady who can still belt our her winner! This interval probably fun for the audience but the lack of any exciting staging or graphics makes it all feel a bit dull to me. Finally, Sertab Erener appears, a little vocally off but it's still great to have Turkey back on the stage, albeit just through Sertab's guest performance. The three ladies reunite at the end to bow and thank the audience.
Recap 2: More minor observations: Kaleen is in her second rehearsal outfit, the silvery one. Armenia stands out to me in the recap. Kenzy's vocals are noticably out on the recap but like I said it sounded like she was saving generally. Georgia has chosen the ending. Norway of course uses the immense leaning back moment and looks immense.
Voting closes! Malin flubs and stumbles over her teleprompter lines, hopefully she'll be a bit more comfortable with the script tomorrow because it feels like she's not even read it before now!
17:50CEST: We then get a retrospective video like the ones from yesterday, this time focussed on songs which 'almost' got to Eurovision, mainly focussed on Sweden to start with, before we learn about Lys Assia's failed attempt to return for Switzerland in 2012 and a couple of German fun facts. Ralph Siegal gets a shoutout with a montage of some of his (many) songs which never made it to Eurovision. Our ears were indeed blessed to avoid them!
17:43CEST: Next is the montage of turquoise carpet looks again like we got for the first semi. Followed by a delay which almost certainly won't be there in the live shows.
17:45CEST: Petra's song 'We Just Love Eurovision Too Much' is next, which is... well, it's nowhere near as good as 'Love Love, Peace Peace' and will probably rub the people who were unhappy with Sweden's win up the wrong way, among other things. Lyrically it is very on the nose in its humour, with jokes about juries voting for Sweden, Eurovision being non-political and more. Charlotte Perrelli Nilsson appears again helping out in the vocals, as does Lynda Woodruff. They were just mentioning Kaarija and the Moomins appeared and then the stream has died, so who knows what happens next! The stream returned for the end, which is a big showgirls style finale. EDIT: Our Discord friends have informed us that Kaarija appears as part of the Finnish section here.
Qualifiers Announcement: Through a choppy stream, we watch the following songs 'qualify': Albania, Malta, Armenia, Switzerland, Belgium, Czechia, Latvia, San Marino, Netherlands and finally Greece! Of course these are completely random so don't read too much into them!
They seemed to drag out the qualifiers section more than on Tuesday to me, perhaps because the intervals are shorter.
Well, that was a weird old time. Thanks for joining us, and we'll be back this evening at 21:00CEST with coverage of the jury rehearsal, hopefully this time with less technical hiccups!
Except... it's not actually over as for some reason Herreys (Sweden 1984) are here to sing us out for the outro. Feels like a strange decision given we can still see the artists in the green/pink room behind the stage reacting to their qualification!

Well, i'm intending to get new gear to start shooting videos and photos (i'm completely new to this). i've been searching a lot and i can't stress the amount of recommendations (withing my budget size) i see on youtube about this 2021 vlog camera the Sony ZV-E10.
So i decided to ask and seek personalized recommendations regarding my case use, budget and experience.

• Experience: As i mentioned before, i am a total beginner in the photography videography thing, and i wanna learn how to do it on the side. (im mainly a musician), a more beginner friendly option would be great
  
• Usage: As some of you guessed, i would like to incorporate photography and videography to my music, for example should content indoors (like skits and music content in my home studio/bedroom) and outdoors (maybe at somewhere cool for some music promo stuff) for social media things. that's for the content side of things. (instagram, Youtube)
  
• i would love to also have something quite good for portraits and for personal photoshoots ( i know i can't do it on my own but i have some friends who they can assist, they have good knowledge in that.)
  
• maybe for later i would even be able to shoot short video clips. (it requires a lot of knowledge and resources for a video clips but i have this in mind, it would be wonderful).
  
• Budget: My budget would start at less than 800USD for both camera body and lens, and then of course i would expand on my filming gear overtime with better lenses accessories and other practicals (i already have a bunch of key lights and light practicals for indoor). I also thought of getting a really good phone like iPhone 13 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra to do those but i am leaning more towards an actual camera with the variety of lenses.
  

So what would you recommend me to get, including the camera (body and lenses). I know some social media (lietrally just instagram) doesn't support 4K, but i would love to get something that can shoot up to 4k just for future proof and versatility.

Hello, this is my first post in this subreddit and i hope everyone's doing well.
Well, i'm intending to get new gear to start shooting videos and photos (i'm completely new to this). i've been searching a lot and i can't stress the amount of recommendations (withing my budget size) i see on youtube about this 2021 vlog camera the Sony ZV-E10.
So i decided to ask and seek personalized recommendations regarding my case use, budget and experience.

• Experience: As i mentioned before, i am a total beginner in the photography videography thing, and i wanna learn how to do it on the side. (im mainly a musician), a more beginner friendly option would be great
  
• Usage: As some of you guessed, i would like to incorporate photography and videography to my music, for example should content indoors (like skits and music content in my home studio/bedroom) and outdoors (maybe at somewhere cool for some music promo stuff) for social media things. that's for the content side of things. (instagram, Youtube)
  
• i would love to also have something quite good for portraits and for personal photoshoots ( i know i can't do it on my own but i have some friends who they can assist, they have good knowledge in that.)
  
• maybe for later i would even be able to shoot short video clips. (it requires a lot of knowledge and resources for a video clips but i have this in mind, it would be wonderful).
  
• Budget: My budget would start at less than 800USD for both camera body and lens, and then of course i would expand on my filming gear overtime with better lenses accessories and other practicals (i already have a bunch of key lights and light practicals for indoor). I also thought of getting a really good phone like iPhone 13 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra to do those but i am leaning more towards an actual camera with the variety of lenses.
  

So what would you recommend me to get, including the camera (body and lenses). I know some social media (lietrally just instagram) doesn't support 4K, but i would love to get something that can shoot up to 4k just for future proof and versatility.

This was an incredible learning curve for me. From filming everything on my own. To editing, doing sound, color correcting, all things I was never taught. It’s been rough for us. But if theres one lesson I learned from this ongoing experience is that we can still do what we love to do! No matter the lack of opportunity or whatever hurdles are thrown our way. Hold your head up and go to work! It doesn’t matter if it stinks or you have a cheap camera and no equipment. If I could do this with no help let alone knowing a goddamn thing about editing then so can you. I’m proud of this, even if its not a Jordan Peele skit like i wish it could reach the level of. This gave me so much drive and fulfillment to keep chugging a long. Don’t give up!!

Welcome to our first dress rehearsal press coverage of the year!

How will this coverage work?

In this afternoon's thread, we will be trialling running our commentary a new way. I will be updating this thread after each performance with my rough thoughts on each rehearsal, with some additional thoughts and comments from some of the other mods too. Please keep refreshing this thread - new updates will be added to the bottom of the OP roughly every five minutes!
For this evening's jury show/dress rehearsal 2/evening preview, we will be covering the rehearsal via Reddit Live like we did last year. This will allow you to read a variety of voices and thoughts on the performances.
___
15:45CEST: We are off! The show begins with a montage of all the artists of this year in postcard style, very wholesome!
15:49CEST: Eleni Foureira kicks off the show, emerging from the middle cube. She's pretty scantily clad and her dance routine includes a bit of handkerchief choreography a bit like Marina Satti this year! There's either fake applause/cheers going on for this first rehearsal or the associated press in the arena are very loud!
15:51CEST: Eric Saade is next, with a rearranged version of his 2011 song 'Popular', complete with a very playful nod to the glass-breaking moment from his original performance.#
15:53CEST: Chanel is next, dressed in a blue costume which reminds me of Albina's (Croatia 2021), with ample booty of course. The backdrop is also blue, and there's pyro for both her an Eleni.
15:55CEST: Our hosts have arrived! Malin is in a pink suit, Petra in orange. About Malmo hosting, Petra says: 'Don't blame me, even I voted for Finland!' They've redone their lines after a bit of improv which reminds us that this is very much the first dress rehearsal. The cheers do appear to be live as whole pockets of the audience have been made up of the press - shoutouts to the press people there in person for being very loud and enthusiastic!#
Song 1: Cyprus
Postcard: The postcard starts with a purple graphic of the world tracing from Malmo to the country in question, in this case Cyprus. There's then a clip from a couple of previous Cypriot entries (1997 and 2012 I believe), and then shots of Silia. It feels quite different but I quite like it!
Performance: This performance really makes the stage feel massive with the use of cyan flooding lights and some effective use of blue flashing lights. Silia is slightly flat throughout and sounds a little nervous in her vocals. Otherwise it's the same energetic open you'd expect. They turned the lights out on her a little too quickly at the end, will probably fix that for the live show!
Song 2: Serbia
Postcard: The songs featured are 2007 and 2022 (Bitti Zdrava!) We see Teya playing her piano in an old building. I quite like the nod to past entrants, but others have mentioned that it provides a comparison to 'greatest' hits which can be unhelpful for current artists. They do also look a bit cheaper than some other users.
Performance: Teya starts off sat down on her rock with some intimate camerawork, being ever so slightly oxymated by the dry ice. She also sounds ever so slightly off to me in the verses, though she's absolutely fine belting it out in the chorus. I must say that I'm not getting fully sucked into the performance here although admittedly I've never really connected with the song - the giant watermarks we get on the digital feed also impacts ability to engage with the performance. There is a very effective final shot though with a lila ramonda which they've kept hidden from the gallery pics! We also see the artists leave the stage at the end, which seems like an intentional new directorial choice.
Song 3: Lithuania
Postcard: The featured songs are 2012 and 2021 (no 2006? Shame!).
Performance: This is the same polished, hypnotic performance from the national final, with a couple of new cool graphical moments. Silvester sounds great too! Camerawork wise there's still too many wide shots (and the video compression is not enjoying all the flashing lights!) but the sound balancing has been pretty excellent so far to my ears.
Song 4: Ireland
Postcard: There's one of Johnny Logan's songs, afraid I missed which one in between messages and catching up typing things! The shots of Bambie are very artistic as you'd expect!
Performance: Bambie starts off with a witchly cackle before the soundtrack has even began (accompanied by a massive cheer from the press). Camerawork is very tight and there's lots of clever shots and imagery which we didn't even have revealed in the gallery - a great shot with a satanic star and with the moon in the background. Bambie is emoting fantastically, and yes there is a costume change! This is three minutes of unforgettable artistry, ending in Bambie's effective high kick from the NF and a massive 'crown the witch' graphic on the backdrop. This is brilliant (and the other mods watching agree). Effing said: 'Wow, Bambie went crazier than Hatari!'
Break: Malin mentions that Bambie is the first non-binary artist - it's kinda weird hearing such an American accent in the main production! Petra then claims to know every single Eurovision song off by heart in a skit where she proves that is not the case. Then the ad break ends and Petra introduces Olly with quite a quick 'Remember, you can't vote for this!'
Finalist A: United Kingdom
Postcard: 1967 and 2022 get shown. Olly is having fun somewhere outside.
Performance: Stream quality took a nosedive at the start so we missed the very beginning. There is lots of very clever 'gravity' choreography, tight dance moves, upside down camerawork and a lot of homoerotic dancemoves. If you found the rehearsal clip too much, you will probably find other parts of it too much although I still think it that clip is the most risque bit. They have stopped the weird facial expressions and open mouths now which helps. The new final chorus is completely revamped and so much better than the original track, with Olly and the dancers finally emerging from their locker room. This enable Olly to go for a vocal big moment which he was slightly off on but otherwise fine. Even then, the camerawork is fantastic, as are the lights and pyro. This is an unforgettable performance and they have elevated this song immensely from the studio. I'm a proud Brit right now!
Song 5: Ukraine:
Postcard: The featured songs were Wild Dances and another one (EDIT: It was Shum, thanks Effing!), afraid I was too busy recovering from Olly and collating my thoughts to notice much else. Interestingly they go straight from the UK into this without announcement.
Performance: Jerry is a little bit vocally weak here and sounds a bit nervy. The graphics are very pretty, with some cool silhouettes on the cubes. There's a couple of other awesome graphical moments, especially the final shot where they lie down on top of a graphic of other women, and a holographic Jerry moment. It's effective but I'd hazard to say not quite as brilliant as a whole as it felt like it might be from the clips seen so far (unsure if the other mods agree!)
Song 6: Poland
Postcard: 1994 and 2014 are the songs of choice.
Performance: This also seems to have gotten a slight musical revamp, with some added melody in the verses and also live backing vocalists providing harmonies which are slightly too loud in the mix. Vocally this is easily the best I've heard from Luna live, although she's still a bit breathy generally. As for what's going on stage, well, it's certainly distinctive. I don't think it's overly distracting in a negative way, but it also doesn't necessarily work either. The moments on the horse are good, but I'm not sure why we need the camera to stick on random chess piece people flailing limbs for so long. The ending seems pretty effective and Luna seems to be enjoying her movement.
Song 7: Croatia
Unfortunately the stream died in a major way at the end of Poland and didn't come back until towards the end of Croatia, and even then was buffering and skipping all over the place. So sadly we can't give any particularly meaningful commentary of this staging until tonight's dress rehearsal. It looked and sounded great from what little we did see though - I particularly love Marko's intonation which he's perfected.
Song 8: Iceland
Postcard: Again missed the postcard due to catching up on post writing! One of the songs was 1986 I believe, but I didn't catch the second one.
Performance: A bit more buffering but the stream seems to have largely recovered. There's some nice lasers and background lights and Hera is owning the stage, but to me she sounds ever so slightly sharp? There's also just not enough going on on stage really to make this engaging, especially after a heavy hitter like Croatia, and her backing singers are shrouded in darkness for some reason. The ending is slightly different with a long note which was ever so slightly off to me.
Ad Break: There's a little bit where they put Eurovision songs over (presumably famous, sorry for being uncultured) movie scenes, tying into Malin's acting experience. There's a shoutout to the many people involved in the technical side of the performance. Clearly the German staging needs a bit of a break as they're still setting it up behind Petra.
Finalist B: Germany
Postcard: Features 1993 (I believe, may have been 1994) and 2010, and Isaak being wholesome with a dog.
Performance: The opening is different to the studio track as he's performed in the preparties. Starts with a slow zoom on Isaak on his seat next to a big fire. Isaak is vocally brilliant and is including lots of extra vocal flourishes, but he's not really hitting any of the cameras and it all feels a bit too much like going through the motions to me. The camerawork is basically lots of slow panning shots around the flaming room. It's nice to see the backing singers appear at the end to do the run na na ay bits, and there's a nice bit with the lights shutting off at the end, but the overall product feels sadly lifeless to me.
Song 9: Slovenia
Postcard: Features 2001 and 2019, underrated gems!
Performance: Starts out very dark with Raiven lying down among some dry ice, but we get to everything being blue and bright rather quickly. The dancers are doing the same thing as in the music video. Camerawork really could do with being a bit more tight, the wide shots don't work for the atmosphere of the song. The ending shot is quite effective too. I don't think this is a write-off by any means but it's not as atmospheric as it could be.
Song 10: Finland
Postcard: Missed the first song due to buffering, but unsurprisingly Kaarija is the other choice!
Performance: Sounded a bit like Teemu was forgetting his words at the start with how he slurred them compared to normal. We do indeed see his ass in at least one camerashot, and there's a couple of moments where we can clearly see his flesh-coloured thong where the dancing/camerawork could do with being a bit tighter. Otherwise it's much the same in terms of visual gags as at UMK. The press in the arena are loving it, of course. The backdrop is surprisingly static and unexciting, as is the lightshow. 'Yeah, this is Finland!' he says at the end.
Song 11: Moldova
Postcard: 2005 and 2010 are shown, although every briefly! We see Natalia getting ready at a studio as well as boxing and going on a picnic with a giant teddy bear.
Performance: This has probably the most colourful and pretty graphics of every performance so far, including a really pretty shot from above with fish swimming around her. Sometimes the graphics and colours are a bit distracting, such as the giant butterflies on the cubes. She's singing well and adding in some extra vocal flourishes, but it really is a very static performance and lacks a clear 'vote me' moment. It was better than I thought it might be from the clips before, but as another mod said, it's lacking that Moldovan magic.
Qualifier C: Sweden
Postcard: No ad break, just a little introduction before Sweden. 1983 and of course 2023 are shown.
Performance: This starts off identically to at Melfest, with the LED walls either side of them and the same choreography and the boys' playful energy. It looks and sounds great. The difference is the end of the song, with the walls pushed right to the edge of the stage. The digital colours and flashing graphics here are immense and this will be a very strong way to start the final on Saturday.
Song 12: Azerbaijan
Postcard: They have a cat! The featured songs are 2009 and 2011.
Performance: Very effective opening here with the use of white and black light and a silhouette emerging from beneath the sea behind Fahree. The backdrop is really cool, as is the use of hands on the floor graphics. Unfortunately he's ever so slightly flat to start and on the very last note, and the camerawork goes full on wide shot city in the chorus which makes it feel a bit flat. You can also clearly see a stagehand rolling the giant hand prop onto stage behind Ilkin (who is perfect vocally). I'm unsure about this - some bits work really well, others feel a bit lifeless.
Song 13: Australia
Postcard: 2015 and 2019 are the songs of choice - poor Dami Im!
Performance: The lights give a kind of rainbow northern lights effects on Zaachariaha's dress, starting with some intimate camerawork which is quite good. It is pretty clearly low budget but they are making the absolute most of the resources they have - their own charisma and well controlled camerawork. There's lots of interactions between Zaachariaha and Michael, and a clever fade into the backing singers arriving. Zaachariaha started singing slightly behind the tune near the end which made it feel a bit messy, which is also how the entrance of the digeridoo bloke feels. Lots of vocal acrobatics too which aren't always convincing.
Song 14: Portugal
Postcard: Missed the first song due to buffering, but obviously 2017 is the second one.
Performance: Lots of stream issues at the start of this one I'm afraid so difficult to get a feel for atmosphere. However, the first shot is really effective in a trimmed narrow aspect ratio which frames Iolanda's expressions. As is the use of white colour throughout which is consistently interesting and adds to the send of intensity that the music gives. Iolanda is vocally flawless, probably the best vocal performance of the day to me. Altogether a very effective performance!
Song 15: Luxembourg
Postcard: 1965 and 1988 I think were shown but again I may be wrong, sorry! Tali is having fun with some friends in a park, and has her now-signature plats too.
Performance: The performance starts out drenched in a kind of pinky-red light as Tali is surrounded by a pink box with other boxes and her dancers around her. Pyro from the first chorus and some clever flashing lights for the revamped end of the chorus. Tali sounds a lot more in control of her breathing to my untrained ear, and she also generally looks and feels a lot more comfortable with what she's doing on stage (though she is a little out of breath at the end!). She's also not got her hair in plats for this performance, instead opting for having her hair tied back - it looks good to me! It's not a perfect performance - the giant CH leopard on the backdrop feels a bit random, and she's over-selling the 'emotional' stripped back penultimate chorus a bit, but this makes a strong end of the semi. Welcome back Luxembourg!
EDIT: Mods who are more familiar with female haircare than me say that this is probably just Tali without her hair done properly.
17:25CEST: Very efficiently, Malin and Petra kick off the voting. Europe, start voting now!
Recap: For now we see random volunteers standing in for the artists in the greenroom! The lady being Silvester Belt is loving it and hilariously it seems to be just a handful of volunteers changing seats! Most of the delegations have gone for the final chorus for their snippets. Bambie goes for the screamo at the very end. We must be cursed because the stream froze again in time for Croatia's snippet!
Interval Act: Johnny Logan gets a very complimentary introduction complete with emotional background music. Not quite sure why they decided to show clips of his winning performances when he's about to perform them again anyway. Ah, that's why - he's singing an orchestral ballad version of Euphoria, complete with an orchestra! It feels more Disney ballad than Johnny Logan ballad, but he's still got the pipes for it!
Green Room: Or should I say the 'pink room', to be more accurate. Luxembourg get a special shoutout and an interview with fake Tali about Luxembourg's victories. Tali's stand in is loving it! The point is made that this is the first time in Tali's lifetime that Luxembourg have participated in Eurovision, which is indeed a fun fact!
We then get a recap of some of the looks from the Turquoise carpet.
Recap 2: To clarify, UK/Germany/Sweden aren't shown in the recaps as they aren't 'competing acts' in this semi. To me, Ireland remains the clear standout because of how stylised the camerawork is, though plenty of other countries look great on the recap. The difference in quality between the first and second halves is pretty stark to me.
Europe, stop voting now! Petra and Malin end the voting by segwaying into a brief skit with the 'Australian commentators', who are upside down of course. After a brief technical delay, Petra has a brief skit about the app with a 'random member of the audience', and then Malin references Belgium 1973's husband and wife duo and dance moves and calls it the first 'Eurovision slay', which is a bit cringy. There's then a 'brief legacy of dance' in Eurovision, showing clips from a lot of different performances across Eurovision history.
17:49CEST: We're now back in the green room with Petra, who makes a joke about providing snacks including a baby lasagna and also refers to herself as 'mother' before giving some fun facts about some of the artists, including Bambie being half Swedish. Then back with Malin on the main stage, who introduces Benjamin Ingrosso...
Interval Act: Benjamin Ingrosso looks completely different to in 2018 - you'd think he's a completely different person given the vocal style is quite different to 2018 too! Not too much to say here, there's some cool angles with the ceiling lights and he performs some of his greatest hits well (including 'Kite'), though with everything else from the postcards to the skits referencing the history of Eurovision it does feel a bit out of place to me! The third song sees dancers finally emerge to join him on stage. The dancers and band are wearing what I'd described as 'Maneskin red' leather. This third song is very groovy and presumably the Swedes in the audience will be loving it.
17:59CEST: Malin and Petra introduce a brief recap through a series of random performances from the past twenty or so years, showcasing the breadth of genres at ESC, including Germany 2009, Serbia and Montenegro 2004, Italy 2015, San Marino 2019, Croatia 2006 and others.
Qualifiers Announcement: With Petra and Malin now equipped with the usual scoring table thing, the LED screen at the back finally opens up 2011 style to reveal the artists behind stage. Malin continues talking over it which is a little strange. Even Martin Osterdahl gets some emotional music for some reason, and a quiet splatter of applause to accompany his traditional 'good to go'.
The fake qualifiers (completely randomised) are: Portugal, Australia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland (with Luna offkey in the clip! D:), Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Serbia, Slovenia and finally ... Finland! Which would mean no Croatia which is not going to happen :P
When the qualifier is announced, we get a splitscreen of their reaction with a clip from their performance. As in previous years it slows down a little for the final three (although Malin jumped the gun a bit in announcing Serbia!).
Thanks for joining us! A couple of other mods will be taking you through the 'jury final' tonight from 21:00CEST using Reddit Live.

Tldr; I was suggested a “mother of two” reel on instagram and it brought up all of the feels. For once I think mom life could allow me to have youthful energy, be pretty, and have fun, three things my narc/enabler mother vehemently prevented me from expressing.
The rest of the post (for those interested, or who can relate): Now, I usually skip past these or hide them. I do NOT enjoy family/mom content and I also resent that it is suggested to me. But, something about this account in particular got to me. For once, I felt like this was a glimpse of what mother life could look like for me, and it seemed fun, genuinely full of love, and also in a non-pretentious, not-preachy way. There were barely any moody, diary style videos, mostly just fun little 10 second skits, either entirely featuring the mom or sometimes her smiling kids and husband in the second half of the skit. (In other words, I got the vibe that they were happy participants in mom’s shenanigans, if involved. I did not see tired looks like it was their fourth, fifth, twentieth take.)
I am an adult child of a narc/enabler mother and uBPD father. My whole family has issues. I never really wanted kids, and yet I also have also given myself permission to occasionally explore what a happy life with a husband and kids could potentially look like. I usually quickly end up I tears and I stop.
Well, this mother was one of those “looks like she could be in her 20’s still” moms who is in her mid-thirties, and she is from my culture. Her husband is not some mediocre middle aged okay-looking-but-has-a-good-job guy (sorry), no he was from the same culture as her and they met “early” so have already been together for like 15-20 years and now have two cute adolescent kids. They are the same age and both are conventionally pretty/handsome. I love that and I honestly want that for myself and yet women all around me are on their high horse telling me that looks do not matter, yet they are the same people who will switch to jealousy and comparison if a handsome man is flirty with another woman in their view. I resent this sexist concept that I am only deemed as valuable as the partner who picked me. Anyways.
I never find toddlers or babies cute, but seeing this young and pretty woman who genuinely looked happy felt different. It is starkly different from my graying mother with a chopped short hairdo (no offense, she just complained of hairloss from pregnancy often, and never allowed ME to grow my hair long).
Of course some content creators are narcs/uBPD queens but it was a smaller account and also I’m mainly referencing the feelings it brought up in me. Thank you if you read some/all of this I have a hard time discussing this with most in my circle. It feels entirely new that being a mother could be one big element of life that doesnt highjack selfcare, beauty routine, a creative hobby, having a partner that is more than just functional(??), not feeling jealous of my kids, and other narc/uBPD stuff that was my reality.

Tldr; I was suggested a “mother of two” reel on instagram and it brought up all of the feels. For once I think mom life could allow me to have youthful energy, be pretty, and have fun, three things my narc mother vehemently prevented me from expressing.
The rest of the post (for those interested, or who can relate): Now, I usually skip past these or hide them. I do NOT enjoy family/mom content and I also resent that it is suggested to me. But, something about this account in particular got to me. For once, I felt like this was a glimpse of what mother life could look like for me, and it seemed fun, genuinely full of love, and also in a non-pretentious nor preachy way. There were barely any moody, diary style videos, mostly just fun little 10 second skits, either entirely featuring the mom or sometimes her smiling kids and husband in the second half of the skit. (In other words, I got the vibe that they were happy participants in mom’s shenanigans, if involved. I did not see tired looks like it was their fourth, fifth, twentieth take.)
I am an adult child of a narc/enabler mother and borderline father. My whole family has issues. I never really wanted kids, and yet I also have also given myself permission to occasionally explore what a happy life with a husband and kids could potentially look like. I usually quickly end up I tears and I stop.
Well, this mother was one of those “looks like she could be in her 20’s still” moms who is in her mid-thirties, and she is from my culture. Her husband is not some mediocre middle aged okay-looking-but-has-a-good-job guy (sorry), no he was from the same culture as her and they met “early” so have already been together for like 15-20 years and now have two cute adolescent kids. They are the same age and both are conventionally pretty/handsome. I love that and I honestly want that for myself and yet women all around me are on their high horse telling me that looks do not matter, yet they are the same people who will switch to jealousy and comparison if a handsome man is flirty with another woman in their view. I resent this narcissistic concept that I am only deemed as valuable as the partner who picked me. Anyways.
I never find toddlers or babies cute, but seeing this young and pretty woman who genuinely looked happy felt different. It is starkly different from my graying mother with a chopped short hairdo (no offense, she just complained of hairloss from pregnancy often, and never allowed ME to grow my hair long).
Of course some content creators are narcs but it was a smaller account and also I’m mainly referencing the feelings it brought up in me. Thank you if you read some/all of this I have a hard time discussing this with most in my circle. It feels entirely new that being a mother could be one big element of life that doesnt highjack selfcare, beauty routine, a creative hobby, having a partner that is more than just functional(??), not feeling jealous of my kids, and other narc stuff that was my reality.

Dear Bobby.
Hey old friend and older lover.
We haven't spoken and I know we won't. I realized I haven't really thought of you much. I think I'm over you. Me and my exgf decided to keep seeing each other so this isn't me switching back. Actually I was in the town we spent our time together yesterday and I did miss you in that moment as I passed 62nd. It made me miss her more and I spoke to Aaron about it. He always tells me to follow my heart.
I'm not sure if I'd say I'm fond of you. I'd never go back to that and I still regret putting myself through the torture of trying to love and believe in you. But hey I do still care. I don't think I'll remember you forever which makes me feel better about returning your grandmother's pin. We just didn't have long enough of a relationship to be truly something I'll remember forever outside the painful lessons you imparted. I can say without a doubt I loved you. But you fucked it up so bad. And you never stopped. Even at the very end you couldn't even give me closure. My exgf can and does. I talk to her the same as you and yet we explain. We correct misunderstanding and we also reexplain and make ammendments to previous statements made. I'll never know with us what went wrong and that leaves me bitter at someone I held so much love for.
You're a crab apple. You could eat it but it is both bitter and sour. No matter how much I love both flavors after the first bite you wish it'd have changed. Like something too salt it overloads you.
I'll hold a bit of bitterness I think forever and knowledge of what I can never allow myself or anyone to do to me. Buy you know I hate you were only a lesson because to me you were also truly beautiful. You were someone I loved. But that class picture doesn't stir me anymore. You're just a guy I had a really one sided relationship with. A really lonely experience. It felt like childhood in so many ways.
But God. You held magic once. Merely your lightest muscle movement drove me wild. I truly don't understand it now. Maybe it is impossible to get through pictures and I no longer really remember you. It's almost been a year and I know those pictures are still on your profile but that is the last thing I need to confirm. Nothing about your current life would do anything for me but harm me. Just like trying to connect with you authentically always did.
Miss you anyway. Miss your love of the small things. Miss your smile. Your silliness. Your skits you thought up in your head. Miss seeing you glow and forget to think negative of yourself when things were good. Hope life goes well for you. I guess I finally just don't want you. The hurt of you was immense. I tried too hard and you saw nothing of me. None of what I did for you ever registered. And it is probably my fault.
Be well. Sorry we were a slowly sinking ship I kept bailing out.

🫖 Welcome back to the Asylum write-up. This is where you live now. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
In this installment, we finally take a closer look at how Emilie Autumn's hyper-loyal fanbase gradually started losing faith in her as, among other things, it became more and more apparent that she... wasn't exactly a reliable narrator – in her semi-autobiographical book, or in general.

HOW IT STARTED: A WOMAN OF MYSTERY

Willow, weep for me Don't think I don't see This life I'm living in two But still it's something I must do I'm not unique in this Nor am I special, sweet, or kind I court a thousand smiles Yet I keep my own to hide behind (“Willow”, 2004 🎵)

I've previously referred to EA as an “expert vagueposter”, and this is relevant here.
For an artist who built her brand on a pledge of raw, rats-and-all honesty, EA has always been quite guarded about the specifics of her personal life. (Until her current partner, for instance, she always danced around calling anyone a boyfriend, even when the nature of the relationship was pretty obvious.) Her whole angle is telling “the truth”, but through whimsical fantasy. As early as the fairy-themed Enchant era, she had her own world, her own vernacular; she spoke in metaphors, in-jokes, and quirky anachronisms. Taxis were carriages, her electric keyboard was a harpsichord, she always capitalized Time and Art like Shakespeare does. On the Asylum forum, automatic word filters would change “fan” to “muffin”, “fairy” to “faerie”, “bra” to “teacup holder”, and “responsibility” to “ratsponsibility”.
She's a chatterbox who loves to share memories and funny anecdotes, but she usually keeps them short and sweet, Snapple-facts style. 📝 She's great at painting by touches in her storytelling, revealing just enough to let your imagination auto-complete the rest. 🔍 Even the most banal tidbits are very artfully told, very “on brand”, often dense with symbolism and foreshadowing – but also very abstracted.
She is especially elusive when it comes to her background and formative years. See the way she catches herself in this interview 📺📝 while describing her “favorite scar”, which is from an eel bite: “My – well, someone I knew... [gasp-laugh] had it as a pet, and...” (She was about to say “my sister”.)
In short, the way EA talks about her life is often very personal, but not all that candid – and sounds more like it's meant to provide a curated, coherent backstory for Emilie Autumn the character, rather than Emilie Autumn the person.

I'll tell the truth, all my songs Are pretty much the fucking same I'm not a fairy but I need More than this life, so I became This creature representing more to you Than just another girl... (“Swallow”, 2006 🎵)

In the beginning, this guardedness naturally contributed to the mystique. It made it all the more special when, once in a while, she would briefly drop the theatrics to share something earnest and relatively unfiltered. Like this composed, but vulnerable post from 2004 📝 about her father losing his battle to cancer, and her attempts at closure over their tense relationship. Or this 2012 anti-bullying campaign thing 📺 in which she opens up about being a target of intense physical bullying in elementary school, to a point that contributed to her being homeschooled at 9.
Fans in the early years were curious about her backstory, of course – but not too prodding or invasive, to my knowledge. I think there was an understanding that EA, like many performers, wanted to come across as human and approachable, while still cultivating an “aura” and retaining some privacy. But obviously, when she announced that she was writing a Tell-All Memoir in 2007, everyone was dying to read it. TEA TIME!

HOW IT'S GOING: A WOMAN OF... MALARKEY???

LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! (“Liar”, 2006 🎵)

As we've learned, the original 2009 release of EA's book was highly anticipated, but somewhat tainted by a bunch of shipping delays and unfulfilled promises. From the start of her career, EA had always cultivated a close parasocial involvement with her audience; many fans had as deep an attachment to her, personally, as they did to her art. So, for instance, when EA tweeted about all the personal dedications she was lovingly writing in overdue books, only for the books to arrive many months later and unsigned with no tangible explanation, it wasn't simply frustrating: it was betrayal amongst kin!
Really, it wasn't so much about fans not getting what they paid for – it was about the lack of clear communication or genuine accountability. This is pure speculation on my part, but the poppycock that EA tweeted about signing the books strikes me as the panic-lie of someone who hadn't realized just how many heartfelt, personalized dedications she would actually have to write when she came home from tour. And then she just couldn't do it, because she was overworked, paralyzed, distracted, depressed, procrastinating, whatever. Which... you know... is unfortunate, but probably not unforgivable. Especially for a touring performer who is open and vocal about their mental health issues.
I'm confident that most fans would have been happy to tell her that her well-being meant more to them than an autograph, or something along those lines. Instead, EA's cagey and avoidant demeanor around this issue left fans very salty – and newly suspicious of their favorite artist's word.
Which was regrettable timing for EA, because they had just received their copies of her memoir.
Here's a cursory look at some key biographical points that didn't hold up to scrutiny when more and more vexed fans, over the years, started looking into them.
Content warning until end of post: family estrangement, death by fire, worsening physical health issues, mention of disordered eating / weight loss / thinspiration, and LIES! LIES! LIIIIIES!

“EMILIE AUTUMN LIDDELL (BORN SEPTEMBER 22, 1979) IS AN AMERICAN SINGER-SONGWRITER...” (Wikipedia)

Every fandom has its Holy Grail. Because a number of EA's early releases were limited pressings put out through now-defunct record labels, the EA fandom in its heyday was a collector's wonderland. 📝🦠 At the height of her popularity, the original Enchant jewelcase (the one with the puzzle-poster) could easily fetch around $500 dollars on eBay, unsigned. The handwritten lyrics of an Opheliac B-side went for $940 in 2009. Don't even ask me about the hard copies of her two poetry books: those never even popped up over the five or six years that I had various alerts set up for all EA-related listings.
But the true crown jewel of EA rarities is the untitled promo version of her (also virtually unfindable) 2001 instrumental debut On a Day... No one knows how many copies exist. The darn thing is so rare that it's not even listed on Discogs. For a while, the only picture of the elusive “Violin” promo CD that was circulated online was this one.🪞 Go ahead, click the link. Notice anything odd? That black box where one composer's birth year should be?
I'm not sure why the notorious hyper-fan who originally shared this picture on the forum in the early 2010s took it upon himself to censor it before posting. I wasn't able to pinpoint when or why people started questioning EA's age, but clearly, something had already transpired to let him know that not redacting said birth year might, uh... cause an upset. In any case: at some point, people started digging – and eventually, the unredacted version of the “Violin” tracklist (as well as public records and literal receipts from eBay auctions) would be brandished as one more piece of damning evidence that EA was indeed (gasp!) two years older than she claimed to be.
“Okay, and?” you shrug. “What's the big deal?” I'm shrugging too! What can I say? People don't like realizing they've been fooled, even about something stupid. I will note that EA's fall equinox birthday (hence her middle name “Autumn”, yes) had been somewhat significant in the fandom. Over the years, EA's birthdays had been marked by online release parties, Q&A's, community events, special merch sales... A number of fans liked donning her trademark cheek heart on September 22. It felt a bit uncanny to realize that she had been announcing a false age on those occasions. It wasn't “a big deal” so much as it was incredibly odd.
Other than being appalled that Self-Proclaimed Staunch Feminist EA would give in to the cult of youth and not cop up to her real age, many fans were just plain bewildered: who would commit so stubbornly to such an inconsequential lie? What was even the point of lying by two years only? Why did she think anyone would care that she was 28 rather than 26 when Opheliac came out? What was she possibly getting out of this...??
My completely speculative theory is that, whether it was her idea or her then-manager's, the lie originated as a marketing strategy early on in her career. The “Violin” demo was recorded in 1997, when EA was 19-going-on-20. Per the liner notes of On a Day... 📝, which came out when she was 22, the demo's purpose was to be “a sort of calling card in the classical music industry”. Evidently, that didn't work out; EA claims, in the same paragraph, to have walked out on a classical recording deal at 18 because they wouldn't give her enough creative control.
Talented and unique as she was, she was trying to break out in a notoriously elitist and innovation-resistant milieu – and unlike her, most of the 22-year-old classical violinists she was in competition with had actually graduated from their prestigious music schools. But you know what sells better than an ambitious college dropout in her early twenties? Tweaking the truth just so to market yourself as an unconventional wunderkind, barely out of her teens! Any rendition of a complex, learnèd musical piece sounds more intriguing and impressive if you think it was played by an especially young (and beautiful) person. 20 was plausible, close enough to her real age, barely a lie at all, and such a nice, round number for a debut album.
Notice how much of the On a Day... liner notes, linked above, center on her precociousness, her uniqueness, and her savant-like dedication to her craft – a focus that seems absent from the promo version (from what I can decipher in those potato-quality pictures, anyway). These talking points would provide the basis for a lot of her early self-promotion and budding stage persona in the Enchant years. Even though the EP failed to make EA a household name in the classical world, the wunderkind narrative was her “in” to grab the attention and heart of a broader audience.
And I guess she's been running with it ever since.

“MY ANCESTRY IS POSITIVELY LITTERED WITH LUNATICS AND GIRLS WHO FALL DOWN RABBIT HOLES ... MY NAME IS EMILIE AUTUMN LIDDELL. YES, THAT LIDDELL.”

Oh, come on. Much as a fan may want to believe, isn't that a little on the nose? The anglophile with an obsession for tea, clocks, and madness... is literally related to Alice in Wonderland? 🔍 Curiouser and curiouser indeed.
EA came out as Emilie Autumn Liddell in The Book – of course – in a passage where she describes an interaction with a nurse. 📝 Note how she stresses the authenticity of her name, and how not-chosen it is (and the Alice connection, which just comes up organically) by disclosing it in a scene where she's filling out paperwork.
I'm pointing this out, because it would be tempting to allow room for creative license (and the slightest cringe) in a work of creative fiction based on personal experience. Buuut... TAFWG was not marketed as fiction. The main narrative in TAFWG, according to EA, is an actual fac-simile of the journals she kept during a harrowing stay at a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. This is something that EA has stressed from the inception of the book (and throughout all subsequents re-issues, even as the main narrative was altered and reworked), even claiming that a legal team had advised her to redact some names to avoid potential lawsuits. So, no, she's not doing a bit there.
When, after it made the rounds a few times, it became apparent that the claim didn't really make sense 📝🔍, reactions were mixed. Some older, diplomatic fans downplayed it as a somewhat embarrassing, but harmless self-mythologizing – similar in nature to her insistence on calling her electric keyboard a “harpsichord”. Devout EA apologists (commonly referred to as “bootlickers” in an increasingly polarized fandom – oh, don't worry, we're getting to that!) invoked the “life as performance art” defense: when she said it was literally her first name, she meant it metaphorically, duh! And either way, she probably had her reasons.
But others took offense at the boldness of the lie, or simply became curious. Was Liddell even her name at all?
If you've checked the link just above, you already know the answer. Per the public California birth log (a somewhat demented invasion of privacy that could well have been avoided by... not repeatedly drawing attention to a name that someone in the book calls “right out of a movie”?) : yes, no, kind of.
EA was born Emily Autumn Fischkopf* on September 22, 1977. The name came from her father, a first-generation immigrant from Germany. Her maternal grandmother's maiden name was Liddell (but no, not that Liddell, or so remotely that it doesn't matter). EA may have had it legally changed at some point in the last decade, but as of 2012, based on the public log of foreign visitors to Brazil (where she toured that year), her passport still bore the name “Emily Autumn Fischkopf”.
*No, EA's birth name is not literally “Fischkopf”. It's a non-silly German name that begins with an F. I know that it's ridiculous to clutch my pearls about EA's peace of mind now, but triggering new and disquieting Google alerts for a name she clearly wants nothing to do with (and that you don't care about) just feels... distasteful? I don't know. That info has been floating around long enough, the point has been made; this write-up is not about EA's last name, but about the fiends we made along the way! So Fischkopf it is.
Let's track the evolution here! It appears that she went by “Autumn Fischkopf” for at least part of her formative years, if we are to believe the credits from Mark Ruffalo's middling film debut 📺 (she was the child actor's violin-playing body double) and this random article about a Nigel Kennedy performance in 1997. 🔍 (That last link – possibly her first ever mention in the press? – is a niche favorite of mine. Violin superstar Nigel Kennedy calls her a “talented fiddler”, which suggests that she did have some cred and promise in the classical milieu at a young age, and that there is at least some truth to her claims of being a wunderkind. It also cracks me up that, out of all the things she's reiterated over the years, “I was born in '79” was a lie, but “I was attacked by a pet eel” was fact-checked by Nigel Kennedy.)
At some point in her late teens, she dropped the Teutonic surname and adopted the French ending of her given name (she made it a “LIE”! how poetic) to form the moniker “Emilie Autumn”. I assume that's also when she started privately going by Emilie / EA for short.
So there you have it. The damning evidence. A performing artist... changed her name. To her grandmother's name. Riveting stuff!
And to think that her fans could have carried on naively believing “Autumn” was her last name, or assuming it was a romantic nom de scène she picked during her Ren Fair phase. Or perhaps, even, not thinking much about her name at all, like normal people.
But nooo, she just had to poke the hornet's nest by making a whole thing out of it.

“MY ENTIRE FAMILY DIED IN A FIRE.”

If you've never encountered a method-acting con artist or a person who struggles with pathological lying (I'll let you decide for yourself which of these, if either, applies to EA), you probably believe that you'd spot them a mile away. And in my experience, that's exactly why you wouldn't! Whether it's compulsion or calculated strategy, successful fibbers rely on people's natural social cues (like their assumption of good faith, their confirmation bias, their empathy, their desire for validation, their fear of awkwardness, ...) to subtly direct the flow and tone of the conversation. This allows them to short-circuit potential questioning of their claims.
One such strategy, for instance, I call the “I-will-not-further-speak-about-the-incident maneuver”. Out of the blue, you drop a graphic and incisive one-liner about something horrific that happened to you, in a curt or flippant tone that throws the listener off and usually shuts them up – thus sparing you from having to back up your claim with any convincing specifics. I'm not saying that every person who does this is a liar. Horrific stuff does happen to people, and I'm not here to police how they're supposed to disclose it. I'm just saying that if you wanted to fabricate an obvious Tragic Backstory™ and smuggle it past otherwise rational, discerning and reasonably intelligent people, that would be one way to do it. Full disclosure: it does work better in person than it does over the internet, especially when you've kept a blog.
When EA curtly dropped this bomb on Twitter (in response to an innocuous fan question that mentioned her parents – the receipt has sadly been X'd out of existence), and every subsequent time a new fan found out about her family's tragic demise (“I had no idea!”), the response was typically one of shock and sadness – and, in a few heartbreaking cases, commiseration from other survivors of family-annihilating events.
Many fans already had a hunch that something was up with her family, of course. She hinted at neglect and possible abuse in her book and lyrics. A number of her fans also came from dysfunctional households, so her not wishing to elaborate on the topic would probably have been a non-issue. But now she's saying they're dead? All of them? In a FIRE?! Holy macaroni! And you know it must have been awful, because EA – the same woman who got a dozen bangers out of a three-month-long toxic relationship, and based over a decade of her work on one bad hospital stay – had never, not once, felt called to share a song or poem about how it might affect a person to... lose all of their entire immediate family to a fire. Hmm. Meanwhile, the handful of older fans who had been following her since Enchant and remembered her dad passing in 2004 gritted their teeth and rolled their eyes. “Do your research. That's all I can say.” (We'll get into the culture of censorship free speech regulation on the Asylum forum in due time.)
Before more and more embittered ex-fans started compiling and circulating the receipts in the early-mid-2010s, investigating the whole “dead family” thing was a lonely journey – a coming-of-age expedition for the critical-minded Plague Rat, trawling through free background check websites and old Wayback Machine archives, until you went “Welp, there it is, I guess” and suddenly felt older, stupider, and a little bit hollow inside.
Although I don't remember how I personally made my way to The Truth (lol) back in the day, I still have a vivid memory of the moment I found the Facebook profile of EA's Very Much Non-Deceased Mother. It was mostly posts about her costume design work. A few candid pictures with EA's siblings and their kids. Christmas, birthdays, a wedding. Just... aggressively normal stuff. It was bizarre, looking in on this family of cheerful strangers with familiar cheekbones. Knowing that, somewhere out there, was an estranged eldest daughter, who had run off years ago to become a fiddle-wielding rockstar – and was now passing them off as having all died a gruesome death, while her fans secretly stalked their family photos. (Because I know you'll be asking in the comments: yes, EA's family is aware. Her mother once posted a picture of young EA and her siblings on Pinterest, sarcastically captioned “After most of us were killed in the fire.” 📝)
Again, it's tempting to discount EA's remark as a metaphor for family estrangement, taken too literally by neurodivergent minors who just didn't understand performance art. Well. First of all, even as a metaphor... let's admit, once again, that that 2000s edginess has aged like fine milk. It's a little crass to make a “metaphor” out of a plausible, life-shattering trauma that other people actually have to live with. (Veronica lost a beloved house to a literal fire 🔍 during her tenure as a Crumpet, for instance; no one died, but that alone seemed pretty rough.)
But, more to the point, evidence suggests that EA also told this to real people in her real, off-stage life – such as her Trisol manager, who backed the claim on the official Asylum Forum in 2007. 📝 When questioned about this post on a renegade forum in 2013, he had this to say:

I was the fool in this case. EA made that up of course. It’s just one thing on a long list of things she made up. Let’s agree she’s very creative with facts if she wants people to believe a story. (...) I once had a short chat with [EA's mom] and I got the strong impression she wasn’t dead at the time. Haha.

(OK, dude, but did you or did you not sell fake EA tickets on a scammy website in 2008? Because we never did get the skinny on that.)
Fifteens years on, EA continues to insist, unprompted, that “the fire” destroyed her childhood drawings and baby pictures. 📝 This more recent Instagram post is like a Greatest Hits of her most notorious yarns, to a degree that's either premeditated trolling or a subconscious call for help. She casually, yet pointedly mentions her age in relation to a specific year... and specifically draws attention to the signature, one that she used well into the Enchant era. In doing so, she made me notice, for the first time, that the A blends into an F. As one could expect from an artsy, Renaissance-obsessed teenager, her OG signature was a freaking monogram for Emily Autumn Fischkopf. It's like “The Tell-Tale Heart” for the digital age! AM I THE ONLY ONE SEEING THIS?? 🦠

A BIT O' THIS & THAT: MISCELLANEOUS CLAIMS

Just for fun, here are other sundry “citation needed” facts that EA has claimed over the years. All are originally from the book unless sourced otherwise. Some of them may have been jokes, some of them might even be true! Whatever that word still means!

• She suffered near-fatal leukemia at age 2, but miraculously recovered. Doctors were baffled.
• She has perfect pitch and tone-color synesthesia. 🔍
• She also had a photographic memory before Ativan ruined it. That's how she remembers what the sky looked like on the day she came out of the hospital leukemia-free.
• It is well-known and well-established, among the bipolar community, that bipolar people all over the world will regularly and inexplicably wake up at 4 in the morning. 🎵 On the dot. No one knows why, but they do. Doctors are baffled.
• She can play the violin on horseback!
• The traumatic hospital stay happened before Opheliac until it happened after. 🔍 Doctors are time lords.
• TAFWVG “has been cited in text-books used as part of the psychology curriculum at Oxford University in London.” 📝 I would have intuited Oxford University to be in Oxford, but then again, I didn't go to Oxford.

ELECTRIC VIOLIN: UNPLUGGED

You know how whenever a musician starts behaving obnoxiously, old sages will come down from Mount Wisdom to advise disgruntled fans to “simply ignore [behavior]” and “just focus on the music”? Well, in the Asylum, “just focusing on the music” won't always preserve you from EA's shenanigans. This “claim” is a little different, but I've decided to include it because it is so odd, emblematic, and ultimately tragic. I also count it as “biographical”, because it involves a key tenet of EA's character sheet: the violin.
Being a kickass fiddler is one of EA's trademarks, and has always been central to her narrative; as of 2024, “world-class violinist” is still the first claim to fame she lists in the “Story” section of her official website. Which beggars the question: why won't she play it? And why won't she acknowledge that she's not playing it?
We got our hopes up in 2020, with that one post 📝 about her iconic 1885 Gand & Bernardel getting refurbished by a luthier – a thoughtful birthday surprise from her boyfriend – but despite the promising “More to come...” at the end of the caption, that turned out to be a false alarm. In truth, it may well have been over a decade since anyone has witnessed EA draw a single note from her cherished instrument.
The fact that Lord Autumn was able to sneak it out during lockdown without the Lady noticing tends to confirm that she hadn't been playing much behind the scenes. She seems to be under the impression that e-violin manufacturer Zeta is no longer in business (they did close down in 2010 🔍, but reopened under new management in 2012), which suggests that she hasn't been keeping up with the violin scene for a while. Besides, the fingernails don't lie. 🐀
As the live shows veered more theatrical with the release of Opheliac, the extended violin features from the Enchant era were cut to two main appearances per concert: “Face the Wall”, a seven-minute-short, Hendrixesque take on Arcangelo Corelli's “La Folia” – and “Unlaced”, an arpeggio-ed frenzy that was originally paired with a stilt-walking and ballet performance by the Crumpets. These two instrumental tracks remained a fixture on four successive tours. And on four successive tours, “Unlaced” was... well... clearly dubbed. 📺 She was holding her e-violin, her hands were playing the notes, but what was coming out of the speakers was indubitably the studio version.
There were possible explanations, of course. Some sound buffs pointed out that “Unlaced” has multiple violin layers, and that a live violin solo would have sounded harsh and unbalanced over the supporting tracks 🔍 – but then, why pick an unplayable song as a staple of the show?
The violin-miming wasn't even very hush-hush, she didn't try that hard to hide it – it was just never addressed or acknowledged. On “Unlaced”, Veronica was usually summoned to “play” the keyboard – and we knew that was make-believe, they had a whole skit about it. 📺 Ditto when EA would play the intro to a song, then get up from the keyboard as she started singing, and the harpsichord track just kept going. It was part of the theatrics, the suspension of disbelief; live playing just wasn't the focus.
Still, because playing two songs should have been in her wheelhouse, EA's choice to stand on stage and mime along with her own world-class violin skills was puzzling. We knew EA was capable of playing “Unlaced”: “Face the Wall” was proof enough that she could still shred like nobody's business, and some lucky fans got to hear her nerd out about pitch standards and rock some Bach at VIP showcases in 2011 (though it was always the same piece, and reportedly not always on point: “she made beginner mistakes, like weird jaw, wrist, elbow placement and tension...” 🐀). And sure, “Face the Wall” was an intense piece, but... it was one of two in the show. The same two, always. She was supposed to be classically trained...!
As EA's fabrications became more common knowledge among the fanbase, people took increasing issue with this odd staging choice – particularly after “Face the Wall” was retired partway through the 2011 tour, leaving only the pantomime, with nothing else happening on stage to distract from it. 📺 People started fixating on her constant and inexplicable tweaking of the truth. Fake name, fake age, fake promises, and now she was fake-fiddling and making a grand show of it? Was she outright mocking her audience, daring them to call her out? Milking a skill she had grown bored with, in the lowest-effort way possible, knowing that goo-goo-eyed fans would still pay to see it? Playing them the world's saddest song on the world's quietest e-violin?
The release of new album Fight Like a Girl in 2012 did little to soothe the Plague Rats' fiddle blues. The violin was much less prominent on FLAG than it had been on Opheliac and Enchant. There were almost no solos, which provided fewer opportunities for playing or miming on stage. “Unlaced” was retired from the touring setlist. One night in Texas during the 2012 tour, due to being on vocal rest, EA played the melody line of “Liar” on the violin. 📺 And that was pretty much the last time world-class violinist Emilie Autumn was heard playing her instrument, on stage or in recording – to the dismay of many fans who had loved her for it.

Can someone please grab this woman by her hand, lead her across her livingroom/bedroom/study, and point at that lonely forgotten dusty violin in a corner of hers so she remembers that she actually owns it? (🐀)

It was yet another bizarre, glaring inconsistency in EA's narrative that fans seemed expected to ignore. Another elephant in the padded room. (Personal anecdote that I don't have a receipt for: in early 2012, when I asked if there was a possibility of EA playing another baroque set for the VIP events on the upcoming tour, her then-manager responded that that wouldn't be possible because venues didn't have the proper acoustics.)
Through some her posts over the years , attentive fans pieced together the likely truth of EA's effective retirement as a violinist. It's actually quite sad, and may cast a different light on EA's artistic shift.
The 2011 tour was initially scheduled for late 2010. It was postponed because EA had been neglecting a jaw injury for years, and needed emergency surgery to avoid “serious and irreversible damage” to her one violin-holding jaw. 📝 She had the surgery early in September; in late November, she performed all over Latin America for six nights straight, and by January, she was back on tour. The same tour during which she made “beginner's mistakes” on the Bach partita, and retired “Face the Wall” for good after a few shows.
She underwent jaw surgery again in 2018, after three years of orthodontic treatment which she said had “prevented [her] from performing”. It was the first anyone was hearing of this (she said she hadn't been touring because she was writing the musical!), and it's as far as EA ever got in terms of half-addressing the obvious: that after dedicating a third of her time on Earth to her craft, after years of pushing through the pain night after night, rushing through recovery periods, and making compromises so the show could go on... she may not be physically able to play concert-level violin anymore.
Once again, something that should (and would) have elicited empathy and support from most fans turned into a point of frustration, speculation and mockery, for years – because EA continued to favor pretend-play and fantasy over the sobering, unglamorous truth. Well, at least everyone's unhappy.

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

​

I still have my original copy on the Gamecube that I got back in 2005. When I got this game, I spent that summer beating it 4 times in a row, doing alternate paths for different party members and endings. I remember even printing out over 50 pages of a Gamefaqs walkthrough and stapling them together as my guide every time I played and encountered some of the more annoying dungeons.
Back then, I only had a Gamecube as I was a diehard Nintendo fan who didn't want any other consoles. I did enjoy some RPGs and when this game came out, it felt like a godsend to finally get a quality RPG from a good studio on such an RPG-starved platform. All in all the game really spoke to me as a teen back then, and while I hated some of the characters and ham-fisted cliches, I am having a blast seeing this game in all it's glory again.
I am playing it right now on the Switch. Yes, I do not like the lower framerate or the poor loading times when entering/exiting the fields or battles within, but the core gameplay is still rock solid. I also enjoy, at least on the Switch version, the character models, textures, and coloring looks a lot more detailed and helps bring the anime aesthetic more to life. The game overall has excellent and varied character designs on all fronts.
I have played Tales of Vesperia (still need to beat it) and Tales of the Abyss and I still personally prefer this more "limited" combat system to those games. It just feels the most fun to play and I love using my old favorite combos playing as Lloyd/Kratos/Zelos to make sure a boss has very little room to breathe. The game works in a way where it kicks your butt if you don't remember to block or control the physical space, yet is a cakewalk if you take the time to be aggressive and push your enemies back. I personally love messing around with it.
What really makes me love this game and appreciate it more as an adult is how the game wears its heart on its sleeve. The game knows when to be dark and serious with some scenes that cover really intense topics, but then quickly goes into some genuinely funny dialogue or one-liners, especially in the skits. In today's sometimes overly cynical media, it's nice to play something that is genuine on all fronts. Really helps you care about the characters and their emotions more. I will also note that the in-game character designs and animations both help and hurt this. In the game, the character models are really chibi, and it is hard to take some scenes seriously when the animations in these scenes are really limited. While it hurts some scenes, it also makes some of the light hearted scenes that much more funny. It knows it's a videogame first and foremost and I do appreciate that.
Overall I highly recommend checking out this game if you want an action RPG that still holds up in both gameplay and story, and try and get it on the Gamecube if you can find it. If not the current rerelease is fine despite poor loading on the Switch.

That diss track being: https://open.spotify.com/track/626jlYCUCqQZZeZ82vLveN?si=dRavyx8xTRK1kCgAv1Bf7g
(MODS THIS THAT HIGH KWALITY EFFORT POST. DON'T YOU DARE)
Disclaimer: Just before I get into this. A few things that I will clarify:

1. This is NOT a comparison of the 2 disstracks
   
2. Every accusation and incidents on the "dissed" artists that I'll put forward is just to convey what the creators of the track claimed. I'm in no position neither do I intend, to imply any of these are true since we don't have any credible evidence in favour of these apparently.
   
3. I love Young Stunners and Rap Demon (lol). But on a serious note, I don't intend to spread any hatred against them through this. Just want to use the current situations to shed some light on and break down the Intricacies of this particular track that didn't get its deserved recognition and attention at the time it was released cos of how incredibly ahead of it's time, this horrorcore diss track was.
   

About Rohani Ilaaj: Firstly decoding the name of the track itself, the term literally translates to "the healing of the soul" which pretty much explains what this track tries to achieve basically.
What makes "meet the grahams" and "Rohani Ilaaj" stand out is how both these tracks are not only very different from what a conventional rap diss track would be like but also the makers of both these tracks portray themselves as some sort of well wishers of their opponents trying to help them out from the addictions and behavorial issues they suffer from, despite of them going wayy below the belt to the point it seems just straight up evil lol.
One of them seems like a letter while the other is a skit with very detailed scenes making vivid pictures in your head through the use of the eerie disturbing production, different voice effects, skits and vocal tones.
Back to the track itself, this diss track by chen and skd can be divided into segments.
The very first segment starts with an intro skit where you hear 2-3 news headlines about serious incidents followed by a few voicenotes of some young guys speaking on how some particular diss track by YS has completely "destroyed" Chen k and how he can never make a comeback. A very interestingly subtle way of showing how the youth is distracted from the more important stuff due to the disses. A cliche yet understandable dig since chen's and skd's music for the most part has been some conscious stuff, raising awareness towards a wide range of societal issues.
Moving further in the same segment, chen starts off the song using his poetic lyrical prowess to paint the picture of a scene with him and YS being in a room of his own house consuming charas - possibly referring to the times when he was friendly with the rap duo and also used to consume drugs.
The storyline further progresses with chen's sudden realization that his current action doesn't fall in line with his set of morals and values and he chooses to go at his then partners in crime trying to make them realize the gravity and seriousness of this addiction while also the bad influence it can have on the vulnerable youth to start committing such acts in public to which a drugged up braggadocious Talha Anjum, who is being mimicked very comically over here btw, replies with stuff similar to the narratives YS came up with, after Chen K's criticism against them during his meet and greet.
Easter Egg: With this only making me realize that this made up scene painted by Chen K of him doing drugs with YS and then trying to stop them from doing it was his way of referring to the time they were friendly and then the events that unfolded after his statements during the meet and greet. Crazy. A slight glimpse of Chen's lyrical ability for you.
Anyways this segment progresses further with references to YS songs and things that they have said with Chen's reply to them. Some of them are witty you can listen to them for yourself. I won't expand on them since they don't really contribute to the point I'm trying to make here
PS: Except this one thing that Chen pointed out, Anjum flexed about making a track on the young girl, Zainab who was r@ped in Pakistan and the news being all around in Pakistan at the time, as if TA only made the track for the credit that would come with it. Chen takes a step further trying to portray TA as a hypocrite for writing lyrics sexualising women himself and then make a protest song against a r@pe case. Quite exaggerated but still counts as it's a major dig at TA's character.
Anyways after the exceptionally written and delivered, goosebumps inducing hook by SKD. We move towards his verse, being the second segment of the song which contains the major meat - the part that made me think of this track while listening to kdot's diss. It is also this time it would be revealed that this diss track is also a sequel to SKD's song "Afsana-e-Dehshat" which was a diss on a bunch of pakistani rappers for some things that happened at the time in PHH. Two of the guys who caught some strays were obviously TA and TY.
On that song, SKD had a decent bar "Gaadhun maa ke qadmo me" for one of those rappers that he was dissing (can't remember who it was) . Many fans along with YS criticized it for SKD crossing the line bringing up Yunus' dead mother misunderstanding that bar to be for Yunus. It was also this misunderstanding that made SKD discover the unfortunate early fate of Yunus' mother - KEEP THIS IN MIND.
Moving on, SKD proceeds to put forward the most serious allegation of this whole feud. A major narrative that TY came up with while going at Chen was that he's doing it to protect the dignity and respect for women - since obviously, Chen K has been called a misogynist quite some times because of his views, at that time, for his then viral song - Ladki.
SKD reveals that Yunus has a friend who is an alcoholic and habitually beats up women and Yunus is aware of it as well. Do note that this bar seems to be SKD trying to question Yunus' own conscience with this fact rather than trying to expose him in the public eye since he doesn't come up with any credible evidence to support the claim. Nevertheless, this does play on to both these guys' major narratives against YS i.e, they're being hypocritical for taking the moral high ground over here and just want an excuse to diss for publicity.
Now before we move further, let's take a moment so i can summarize the very track that brought us here in the first place - meet the grahams, so you can start connecting the similarities for yourself:
This particular track has Kendrick writing a letter to each one of Drake's family members and Drake. Blaming Drake's father since he believes drake has inherited some addictions from him, empathizing with Drake's mother, going at Drake for the wrongs that he has done. But the darkest part lies when he addresses his son and his allegedly hidden daughter. Politely teaching them values and telling them how their father isn't good enough. I mean imagine growing up and listening some random ass man tell you shit about your father and how he hasn't done enough for you. Some heavy shit there.
To tell your opponent's loved one how their flaws are too much for them to be respected, claim to be taking the responsibility that you're the one who can help your opponent "recover" and make this more about your opponent going through something serious rather than you just having a rap battle with them. Guess who else, other than kendrick, did it before him wayyy back in 2019.
Nevermind, y'all already know by now lol, I'm just yet to tie things up. It's a long 8 minute diss track, will keep it till here for now.
To be continued.

I met him through the talent agency that I was working with. He hired actors from there. I think his only real friend ever was Shane Dawson. Almost every actor in his skits are from talent agencies. He used to pay us but stopped. The last skit I was in with him, I asked him about pay. Then he lied to me and ghosted me since. It was the scary movie skits he did about 7 years ago. The next one after that, he wanted all of us to drive 4-6 hours into another town that he rented a house in for the skit and for a pool. I asked him about pay especially since he wanted us over night and he had "fans" flying in to be in the skit with him. He then told me that "it was full" suddenly but a friend of mine that went said that there was room.
So for anyone wondering who I was to him: I was an actress. Not a neighbor. Never even heard of him until the agency asked if I wanted to do some YouTube stuff.
Ya'll came so hard at me at the first skits that I thought you guys were really just making stuff up because it was so hard to believe. Also every fake girlfriend YouTube skit that we made, I asked Lainey for permission and although she said it was okay, it wasn't. Her and onion have a strange relationship if you ask me. I'm closer to onion's age so me and her never really clicked but her and Maddy did since they're close of age. Also I have and had boundaries. He started to push them after the second day/ second or so skit of us working together. Whatever I didn't want to do or say, he would have Maddy do. Some of the really vulgar lines that Maddy said in the earlier skits, were meant for me. Like "f# me in my ass" in one of the skits. He didn't like me much after realizing that I had boundaries.
Also he would regularly insult us actors on set. One time he didn't tell us that he was still filming but he acted like something went wrong so all of us on set got worried that he might have broken something or something. He then stopped and said that we only believed him because we're shit actors and he was the only real one. It basically ended the night then. It wasn't funny, we really thought he was in trouble because everything was fine then he started freaking out and running. It wasn't during a time where he said that we were filming.
He also used to take all of us out to dinner after filming the skits and then chastise us for eating. Called me a garbage disposal a few times but I don't give a f what a random stranger thinks of me and the food was good. I barely ever saw Lainey eat and if she did, it was no more than 3 bites. He has serious body dysmorphia and would regularly try to reflect it on the people that he was around. Legit the last skit I was in with him, the scary movie one that he made with everyone, he brought grape soda and a few muffins. Didn't tell any of us to bring food or anything and when someone talked about getting pizza if I recall correctly, he shot the idea down. We were starving on set.
I had no idea of any of the stuff that was going on until after the wetlands incident. The last message I sent him, I asked to take his dog, the great pyrenees girl, because I saw that she wasn't getting taken care of and I have a great pyrenees now. They are total love bugs. They force every animal they have to be vegan. I had issues with that too and their tiny white dog had sooo many issues because of it. He would joke to me about the little white one not being able to move it's arm a few times due to "old age" but I think it was because of the food they were giving them.
The comment I made about their house being dirty was real and he made the skit out of it.
Also he has 0 self awareness. In the skit with me saying "thanks for farting, it smells like shit", that was real and within the first few hours that I met him.
Anyways, figured I'd shine some light on everyone's thoughts on how he really is from someone that used to work for him. I apologize if I ever upset anyone in the past during our interactions.

I didn’t have IFC growing up. I watched all the skits on YouTube like most people who discovered them. That’s where you can still watch all of this omitted content. Nobody who only has this streaming service which, if I’m being honest have only heard of it for the first time because of this event, can’t also go on YouTube to find more content made by a sketch comedy group whose show aired fifteen years ago.
If they wanted to omit some of their sketches for a new audience, good for them. If the streaming service didn’t want to air certain sketches, that’s also okay. It doesn’t matter either way.
Their other content is still accessible elsewhere. It hasn’t been scrubbed from the internet. Someone who watches their content on this new streaming service and wants to find more, can do that. The internet makes this stuff available to us. There is this whole subreddit of doll-lickers and multiple YouTube videos spanning fifteen years with these sketches uploaded.
And yeah, sure, you could argue, that since I’m trans and some of this content was removed “so it wouldn’t hurt my wittle feelings” is why I don’t care they omitted things. But I would just honestly rather support the guys who have been making me laugh for 15 years than complain so heavily about something that doesn’t matter.
Like I’m sad it’s not all on there but I’m not gonna be vehemently disappointed in the group for this. If the guys go out of their way to make it hard to find this content, then I’ll be ready to explode.
Can’t wait for Mars.
Love all the sketches, especially the ones I can still watch on YouTube.
Respectfully, go fuck yourselves doll-lickers
Necessary Edit (copied one of my comments):
I am pretty disappointed the box set will be censored too. I made this post with only the streaming service in mind. Had no clue the box set would be censored too.
I'm still gonna buy it. It'll look nice on the shelf next to Miss March and Clerks 1 and 2. I'm disappointed, but still excited. But I very much do understand the disappointment in those being censored.
I still don't care, to the point of shutting down my support for these guys. But its a VERY valid criticism that I didn't originally mean to shut down with this post.

I’m such a huge fan of the WKUK that Family, Friends, and Co-Workers have made fun of me for how much I share and reference this show.
“Why do you even watch it when you already have it memorized?” Is something that has been said to me.
——
No arguments here, just my opinion.
After seeing the recent post about which sketches have been excised from the current release (bless you kind soldier for providing that information) I’ve decided that the collection I planned on purchasing isn’t worth it anymore.
Before you call me a right-wing nut job it’d be nice to explain myself for you all.
——-
I love Blazing Saddles from Mel Brooks because it points out how absurd racism actually is, and that’s what makes it funny.
If that movie had a “re-release” with jokes censored, bleeped, or removed, I wouldn’t watch it.
——
If a band you loved sold a remastered version of their first album without tracks #3 and #7 because “they didn’t land” I wouldn’t buy it. What if those were my favorite songs?
—-
Art isn’t something to look back on and wonder how it could’ve been different, it was a time capsule of what had been happening in that moment.
——
A majority of what I’d seen being taken out had to deal with racial and homophobic jokes.
Black doctor needs to be in a museum next to Peter Frampton’s guitar…… too bad it mentioned certain groups of people and got scratched.
There are YouTube Channels of only Black dudes that watch these rAcIsT sketches and laugh their asses off.
Seeing certain groups of people being made fun of while able to enjoy it means the jokes worked, and proves it’s even funnier because of that. We’ve lost the ability to laugh at ourselves because of online modern culture.
“I’m fat”
You go! “I’m not gonna tell you what to do.
“I’m Gay”
Good for you, I’ll help support your rights.
“I’m Trans”
It’s absolutely incredible that you’ve found yourself.
“A joke made me mad”
What?!
—-
Trying to please the internet will never work. Let’s admit there was going to be conflict either way regardless of what was taken out or not. People would still have a problem with it either way.
It just bums me out you guys eventually became ashamed of your art.
I love Darren for being a poof(and my hottest favorite), I love Sam for finally getting out of that bag, and showing up late to the Season One commentary. (The other guys ragging on you is absolutely hilarious) I love Timmy for being the forefront of a baked bean fetish, always willing to be the butt of the joke at my expense, and of course the “wiggle dance”. I love Zach for his perfect line delivery, his attention deficit disorder, and not understanding what a Whahale is.
And finally Trevor, the only celebrity I ever wanted to meet. He changed the course of my life and humor forever.

ReleasetheSnydercut

I’ve got the original show in SD, but it’s a strange feeling to see online culture have an impact on something that I would’ve payed $200 to see in its upscale original form.
——
The first two sketches I showed my friends were classroom skit and dating game.
Because those sketches mention race at the very end, they’re no longer acceptable.
It’s hard to interpret intention over text, but know this is meant with love.
Still gonna continue to support Mars, My only point is that I’d rather watch the show in low quality than see an HD 2024 cut.
Thanks for reading. <3

Quick overview: https://www.reddit.com/100Kanojo/comments/18ifh7b/oc_idea_for_an_arc_concluding_with_5_new/
At last the family has finally reached the other end of the United States, arriving in New York City and after returning the RVs, hoping the lender service doesn't notice Maddy's repairs, they naturally go to visit the various sights: Central Park, Times Square, Empire State Building, etc.
On the way to their hotel however, while taking the subway, Rentarou collides into someone as the cart stops, immediately apologizing when...
ZING!
A punky Japanese girl carrying a guitar case stares at him with wild bewilderment, before she is swept away by the movement of the crowd without being able to relay to Rentarou so much as another word, leaving him distressed. How is he supposed to find his soulmate in the haystack that is New York.
His family also notices that his worry is starting to take a toll on him, so Hahari, together with Hakari and Makiya invite him to accompany them to a very high class event as just Hakari. (Although Hakari has to step on her mother's shoe multiple times to prevent her from gushing over Rentarou too much. "My boy..." WAM! "my DAUGHTER'S boyfriend...") with Makiya getting a first taste of the family's antics.
As a highlight of the evening, the orchestra of a local elite school is playing and when looking at the players who else does he discover but the punky girl he had spotted the day prior, now however far more prim and proper looking and playing the violin.
She introduces herself as Sapphire Kazaki and tries to ignore Rentarou's comments how she looks completely different than in the subway, especially when her parents come in having gotten to talk with Hahari.
Apparently they have complained about their daughter's need for a cram teacher in Japanese and with Hahari knowing a Japanese teacher (Naddy) they ask if she could help her 'terrible grade' improve.
On the other hand they do chastise Hahari for taking her daughter's education too lightly, as only 80 to 90 points for the daughter of a CEO of an International company 'just isn't good enough'. (It takes a lot of willpower from Rentarou to not get into a fisticuff with Spahire's father.) Sapphire tells them to meet them with her other cram teacher, a girl her age called Daisy Liu.
When Rentarou, Naddy, Antonia and some of the more academically gifted girlfriends come to the address they find it to be a studio with the people in it looking wild and punky, including Sapphire, who tries to play the 'cool girl who doesn't give a damn'. She also introduces Daisy who she became friends with after her parents hired as her cram teacher for music.
As they get to the lessons between Sapphire's band's jam session the other realize that her Japanese is actually pretty good and openly ask her why the hell she would need a cram teacher.
The answer is her school report card: All straight A+, except Japanese, where she has an A-. As it turns out her parents are tiger parents (Think Steven He skits: Overbearing, demanding perfect grades, must play violin or piano, etc...)
As such, they switch the lesson out to instead continue Naddy's English lessons, while Sapphire's band continues practicing. from time to time Rentarou and she get to talk, him encouraging her to play music she wants to play, proving that the zing wasn't just some flash in the pan. She pretends to be too cool for it.
They all promise to be there for her concert in happening in three days.
After they leave however she squeals at her love for Rentarou, confessing how much she likes him (She really, really, really, really, really likes him.) Upon Daisy, who has eyed Rentarou with suspicion, comments that he is going to return to Japan soon. "It is not like you can follow him all the way to Japan."
Sapphire however gets the idea to ask her parents to take an exchange year there, 'to improve her Japanese', but in truth she can stay with him. As she gushes about her new found love however, she doesn't realize how hurt her friend is by that idea, for in truth, Daisy has had an unrequited love for her. And now she was just gonna leave on a whim for 'some random guy'.
As the family returns to the studio the next day, they hear that the concert has been cancelled as Sapphire announced her parents had found out about her double life and are deeply disappointed in their daughter, as well as having fallen in love with Rentarou ('No boyfriend! But we will ask you every day about why you haven't gotten married yet as soon as you are out of university').
Under the cover of being the cram teacher Nano gets access to her, the truth being that her cram teacher Daisy Liu, has spilled it to the parents, who have grounded her for the rest of the summer holidays having her learn for the Ivy League entrance exams already. She resents them for it, but alas 'it can't be helped'.
Rentarou however quickly organizes a breakout attempt to get her to her concert (The irony is not lost on Hahari), but not before having a face to face talk with Daisy, who rants at him how she has been with Sapphire for years and now he just walks along and swoops her up while already having dozens of girlfriends. In short she despises him.
Rentarou tanks it, telling her that she loves each and everyone of them, no matter if they were the first ones to join or have just fallen in love with him like Antonia, Josephine, Nokomis, Maddy, Makiya and of course Sapphire, with him having another version of that page where he lists what he loves about them, with Sapphire being cute when she tries to pretend to not care at all, while being deeply enamoured with the things she likes. Upon hearing this
Daisy breaks into tears, having broken her friend's dreams just so she can keep her close, deciding to rectify for her actions, helping to get the concert back on track.
The rescue attempt involves the New York Fire Ladders and a car chase sequence with the Kazaki's as well as the Parents' association of Sapphire's school, having been called for backup. All the while the restless crowd gets a preshow by Himeka (Voice), Rin (Violin) and Maddy (Banjo).
As the Sapphire arrives, she sees Daisy, still feeling betrayed but deciding to delay any talk with her until after the concert, the rest of the band just happy to see their lead singer and guitarist return.
As her parents arrive in the concert hall the music starts, which could go a bit something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkWML41wUCo
The crowd roars and Sapphire jumps in crowd surfing all the way to Rentarou, who she kisses before she even has her feet on the ground.
Her parents never having her seen so passionate about really anything, begrudgingly allow her to continue her passions, with her promising not to let her grades fall to harshly.
This is then followed by a scene where Daisy and Sapphire make up, Daisy accepting being just 'a friend' to her, while pressing Rentarou to promise 'to never break her heart ever!', with his answer being obvious. (Daisy after he swears his undying love to Sapphire: 'Crap, if you were a girl I would totally fall for you.')
And so with only having 2 days left, the family decides to spent the last day playing a game of baseball in the Yankee Stadium (courtesy of Hahari and Makiya), with Rentarou being the referee for fairness sake, but the prizes for both teams being the same: Getting a kiss from Rentarou.
On the last day, having parted ways with Sapphire, Makiya, Maddy, Nokomis and Josephine at JFK airport, they attend the birthday party of Antonia's grandmother which includes her over a dozen children and their respective families.
Naddy also meets Antonia's Japanese teacher again together with Rentarou and Antonia in his home with his wife and children, Naddy being amazed how it is very American and yet not. She does her presentation with Antonia's teacher letting her pass barely ('I certainly wouldn't have expected you to improve so rapidly')
After all this they all fly back in the evening and land in Japan with school starting again the next day. Although they notice Rentarou visibly starting to miss his American girlfriends, as the effects of soulmate separation don't spare him.
The solution: The family, together with the American girlfriends organize them all to be exchange students in Japan who just happen to all attend the same school. Upon the 6 showing up at the school roof and it being explained to him he proclaims how he really, really, really, really, really loves them and that they are the best girlfriends he could wish for.
Next on: I dunno, further explanations on the American girlfriends' relations to each other and the canon girlfriends as well as some hijinks they might get up to in Japan. I will put up a mainpost bundling them all this Friday on the main sub.